Link Hover Reveal

An Obsidian plugin that keeps markdown links collapsed to just their title text in Live Preview — even while your cursor moves through the document.

Problem

By default, Obsidian's Live Preview expands a markdown link to its raw [text](url) form whenever the cursor touches it — including just landing on the edge of the link while arrowing between lines. If your notes are lists of links (e.g. bookmarks, task lists with reference URLs), reordering or navigating them causes constant, disruptive expand/collapse flicker.

What it does

• Links render as plain title text, e.g. [My bookmark title](https://example.com) shows as just My bookmark title.
• The title is real, editable text — move the cursor through it and edit words freely with the keyboard.
• The [, ], (url) syntax stays hidden at all times; the cursor skips over it instead of landing inside, so navigating between lines never expands a link.
• Clicking the title places the cursor, like normal text; Cmd/Ctrl-click opens the link.
• Hover a link (after a brief delay) to see a small popup below it with the truncated URL and three actions: copy, open, and edit.
• Edit link at cursor command opens the same popup straight into edit mode, from the keyboard, no mouse needed. It ships without a default hotkey — assign one in Settings → Hotkeys.

Privacy

The plugin makes no network requests and stores no data. It writes to the system clipboard only when you click the popup's copy button, and only the URL of the link you copied; it never reads the clipboard.

Installation

Community Plugins (recommended)

1. In Obsidian, go to Settings → Community plugins → Browse.
2. Search for Link Hover Reveal.
3. Click Install, then Enable.

Manual

1. Download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest release.
2. Copy them into <your-vault>/.obsidian/plugins/link-hover-reveal/.
3. Reload Obsidian and enable Link Hover Reveal in Community Plugins.

From source

npm install --legacy-peer-deps
npm run build

Then copy main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css into your vault's plugin folder as above.

To build and copy in one step, point npm run deploy at your vault — either via the OBSIDIAN_PLUGIN_DIR environment variable, or by writing the plugin folder path into a .deploy-target file (git-ignored):

echo "<your-vault>/.obsidian/plugins/link-hover-reveal" > .deploy-target
npm run deploy

License

MIT