Feature: Support standard Markdown links in addition to Obsidian wikilinks

[babrar]

Hi @daxcore ,

Thanks for creating this plugin. I'm a big fan of interactive graphs and really appreciate having this experience in MkDocs. I also appreciated the quick turnaround on the patch I submitted a couple of weeks ago.

My main concern is that the graph currently requires Obsidian-style wikilinks. Many users already have knowledge bases written in standard Markdown/HTML, which makes the plugin less plug-and-play for them. Teams also often prefer to stay close to plain Markdown/HTML for portability and tooling compatibility (easier tool switching, standard linters/parsers, etc.). In those cases, the current wikilink requirement may limit adoption.

Proposed Feature: Support Standard Markdown Links

I’d like to propose adding support for standard Markdown links as an alternative to Obsidian wikilinks.

The idea is to let users choose whether the graph is built from:

• standard Markdown links, or
• the existing Obsidian-style wikilink syntax (default).

For example:

plugins:
  - obsidian-interactive-graph:
      link_syntax: "markdown"  # "obsidian" by default

This would make the plugin usable out-of-the-box for many more Markdown-based knowledge bases while preserving current behavior by default.

Roadmap / Plan

If you’re open to this direction, my plan would be:

1. Add a test suite so future changes can be validated and don’t break existing behavior.
2. Start implementing the new link_syntax option and Markdown-link parsing.

Important

Before I start on the implementation, I’d like to confirm that you’re okay with this approach, or if you have preferences on how you’d like this to be structured.

Other Options Considered

I looked at https://github.com/develmusa/mkdocs-network-graph-plugin as an alternative, but decided against it for now:

1. It ships with a fixed JS asset, which makes customization harder. A key advantage of this plugin is that the JS asset is decoupled from the core logic, giving users the freedom to tailor their own graph behavior (which I need).
2. Open PRs on that project haven’t been reviewed in over two months.
3. This plugin has a lot more traction, so improvements here would likely help more users.

I have a few more ideas to extend the plugin’s usability, but I’d like to start with testing and link syntax flexibility first. Let me know if you have any thoughts/objections.

[daxcore]

hi @babrar,

I had a small look into that and I guess the feature could be done very easy by supporting both in parallel.

Obsidian: [[Link#Anchor|Custom Text]]
Markdown: [Custom Text](Link)

The only thing is the way, how to link between the pages/markdown files.

With obsidian style I can write [[Conecpt]] if I want to link the 'Concept' page. mkdocs-obsidian-bridge plugin will handle everything else. Please have a look into the README file there.
In plain markdown we could get work the following, by just a small adaptions in the graph python script: [Concept](../Concept).

I haven’t tested it, what will happened if pages are not inside one single directory...
Feel free to reuse this #10. I dont think, that we will need an explicit variant/option (link_syntax) for this feature.

BR.

[babrar]

Hi @daxcore, thanks for the quick response. Before I review #10, here are the integration + performance tests for the current state of the plugin: #11

We need these baseline tests to ensure future changes don't break the existing behaviour. Can you review the changes? Thanks.