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Hide backlinks for child items in a tree #3515

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@spaceghost24

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@spaceghost24

⚠️ Check request is valid.

  • My request is about the Tasks plugin for Obsidian.
  • I am only requesting a single feature in the Tasks plugin. Multiple changes should be split into individual requests, with links between them.
  • I believe my requested feature will be generally applicable to other Tasks plugin users, not just me: it is not uniquely tied to my personal workflow.

⚠️ Please check that this feature request hasn't been suggested before.

🔖 Feature description

I understand that the tree feature is still being developed, but I didn't see this particular point being discussed.

As far as I understand, children of tasks will always be in the same file and under the same heading as their parent. Backlinks can provide useful context and navigation, but I don't see the use in displaying them for every child item, since it provides no extra information, while creating a lot of visual clutter that makes the list hard to scan.

✔️ Solution

I believe it would be reasonable to completely hide backlinks for all child items in the tree view, even when "show backlinks" is on.

❓ Alternatives

The one use case I can think of for wanting to display the backlinks on child tasks is if somebody had so many subtasks under a single parent that it would be extremely inconvenient to navigate to a specific subtask in the original file without the ability to jump to it directly. You could accommodate for that by making hiding backlinks for children a setting or layout instruction.

It could also be interesting to approach the problem from the other direction and only hide backlinks for the innermost children (rather than only showing them for the outermost children). This could provide a middle ground between navigability and visual clutter, and mirror markdown's hierarchical heading structure, where you can jump to any heading (parent task) but not to the direct content under a heading (child task with no children of its own).

📝 Additional Context

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    scope: backlinksAnything to do with the backlinks displayed in task listsscope: rendering of tasksHow the plugin displays tasks, including search results (except CSS issues)scope: sub-tasks and super-tasksnested/parent/child: controlling their display, filtering them, and similartype: enhancementNew feature or request

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