Pages & Editor

Wiki-Links and Backlinks

Wiki-links are how your world becomes a graph instead of a list — every [[Page Name]] you write creates a live, navigable connection, and every page knows who’s linking to it.

Create a wiki-link

Click into any editor body and type [[. An autocomplete dropdown appears listing your workspace pages. Continue typing to filter the list, then press Enter or click a result to insert the link.

The link appears as a styled pill inline in your text. Clicking the pill navigates to the target page. The autocomplete closes automatically, or press Escape to dismiss it without inserting.

Ghost links — writing ahead of your world

If you type [[The Lamplighters Guild]] but no page with that title exists, the link appears with ghost styling: dimmed text and a dashed border. This is not an error.

Ghost links are promises. They let you reference things that don’t exist yet while you’re writing — a character mentions an organization, a location refers to a neighboring city, and you keep writing without interrupting yourself to create those pages first.

When you eventually create a page titled The Lamplighters Guild, every ghost link pointing to it resolves automatically the next time you navigate to the pages containing them.

Backlinks and outgoing links

Every page has a detail panel — a sidebar or panel showing metadata, connections, and word count. The panel displays:

Backlinks — pages that contain wiki-links pointing to this page
Outgoing links — wiki-links contained within this page’s content

A page with no backlinks shows an empty backlinks section. A new page with no content shows an empty outgoing links section. Neither is an error state.

To see Magistrate Thorne’s connections, open her page and check the detail panel. If twelve other pages link to her, all twelve appear in the backlinks list. This gives you a real-time view of how connected any given page is to the rest of your world.

Circular links

Pages can link to each other — Magistrate Thorne links to Thornwall Keep, Thornwall Keep links to Magistrate Thorne. Inklings handles circular references without issue. The backlink panel for each page correctly shows the other as a backlink, and you can navigate between them freely.

Link to a heading

A wiki-link can target a specific heading within a page, not just the page itself. When you click such a link, the target page opens and scrolls to that heading.

The autocomplete supports fragment selection for headings within a page. The link is stored as [[Display Text|target-slug#heading-anchor]]. Clicking it navigates to target-slug and scrolls to the #heading-anchor position.

Rename a page without breaking links

When you rename a page, Inklings updates every wiki-link across your workspace that pointed to the old title.

Before committing the rename, a dialog shows you how many pages will be affected. You can confirm or cancel from there. After confirmation, all links update automatically — display text, slug targets, and backlink records.

If you rename Thornwall Keep to Thornwall Citadel, every page with a [[Thornwall Keep|thornwall-keep]] link is rewritten. No links break.

A page with no incoming links (no one has linked to it yet) renames cleanly with no dialog — there’s nothing to update.

Special characters in page titles

Page titles can include apostrophes, hyphens, and parentheses. The autocomplete handles them correctly — typing “Hero’s” filters to pages whose titles contain that string. The resulting wiki-link pill displays the full title including the special characters.