Concepts

How Pages Connect

In most note-taking tools, a page is a container. You put text in it, you find it by title, and that’s the relationship: page contains text, text lives in page. Inklings treats pages differently. A page isn’t just a container — it’s a point in a web of connections, connected to other pages through links, nested beneath parent pages in a tree, and visible to everything that references it.

Understanding how pages connect to each other is the key to getting the most out of Inklings. There are four kinds of connection: wiki-links, backlinks, ghost links, and hierarchy. They work together to make your workspace navigable in ways a folder full of documents never could be.

Wiki-Links: Forward Connections

A wiki-link is a connection you create intentionally. In the editor, typing [[ opens an autocomplete dropdown showing your existing pages. Select one, and a styled link appears inline in your text — a pill, visually distinct from surrounding prose.

Click the link to navigate to the target page. The sidebar updates to highlight that page, and the editor shows its content. Clicking the browser-style back button (or navigating in the sidebar) returns you to where you started.

Wiki-links capture the relationships that matter. “Magistrate Thorne governs Thornwall Keep” is not just a sentence — it’s a navigable connection. The reader (you, later) can follow it.

Backlinks: Automatic Reverse Connections

Every wiki-link creates two connections simultaneously: the forward link you created, and a reverse link that the system creates automatically.

When Magistrate Thorne’s page links to Thornwall Keep, Thornwall Keep automatically records Magistrate Thorne as a page that links to it. Open Thornwall Keep’s detail panel and you’ll see Magistrate Thorne in the backlinks section — without you having to add her there manually.

This bidirectionality is what makes wiki-links fundamentally different from hyperlinks. The relationship is visible from both ends. Thornwall Keep doesn’t just know what it links to (its outgoing links) — it also knows what links to it (its incoming backlinks).

As you build a workspace with dozens or hundreds of pages and wiki-links, backlinks become a powerful navigation tool. Every page accumulates a list of pages that reference it. The more links you create, the richer this web of connections becomes.

Ghost Links: Connections to Pages That Don’t Exist Yet

You don’t have to create a page before you can link to it. Type [[The Verdant Undercity]] and a link appears — but with a dimmed visual style, indicating the destination doesn’t exist yet. This is a ghost link.

Ghost links are intentional. They let you name a thing and connect to it without stopping to create the page immediately. The ghost link is a placeholder, a promise, a reminder of something you intend to build.

When you eventually create a page titled “The Verdant Undercity,” every ghost link pointing to that name resolves automatically. The dimmed style clears, the link becomes active, and the connection is complete. You didn’t have to go back and fix anything — the link was waiting for the page to arrive.

Ghost links are particularly useful during fast drafting. As names emerge in your writing, link them immediately. The web of connections builds its skeleton as you write; you fill in the referenced pages later, when you’re ready.

Hierarchy: Parent-Child Nesting

Not all page connections are through links. The page tree in the sidebar represents a different kind of relationship: hierarchy. A page can be a child of another page, nested beneath it in the tree.

Geography
├── The Shattered Spire (continent)
│   ├── The Verdant Undercity
│   ├── Port Ash
│   └── The Eastern Reach
│       └── Thornwall Keep

Hierarchy is organizational. It represents containment or belonging: Thornwall Keep belongs to the Eastern Reach, which belongs to the Shattered Spire. Navigate the tree by expanding parent pages to reveal their children.

Hierarchy and wiki-links work together, not instead of each other. A page’s position in the tree tells you where it belongs in your organizational scheme. Its wiki-links tell you what it relates to semantically. A character page nested under “Characters/” is organizationally a character; its wiki-links to locations and factions describe what it is connected to.

How the Four Connections Work Together

Consider Magistrate Thorne. She exists in a four-dimensional relationship space:

Hierarchy: She’s nested under the Characters folder
Wiki-links: Her page links to Thornwall Keep, the Iron Accord, and the Pact of Silence
Backlinks: Session notes, faction pages, and location pages all link back to her
Ghost links: She links to “The Verdant Undercity” before that page has been written

Open Thorne’s page and you see: where she sits in the organizational tree (hierarchy), what she connects to (outgoing links), and what connects to her (backlinks). Navigate from her page to Thornwall Keep; from Thornwall Keep’s backlinks, find every other page that references the keep; from one of those session notes, follow links to the NPCs who were present.

This is what it means for pages to connect: not just to be stored near each other, but to be genuinely linked in a navigable web of connections. The more consistently you build that web, the more useful your workspace becomes.