To the best of my knowledge, none of these important functions works in Obsidian when using the markdown link option.
Definitely give it a try, perhaps in a test vault! To be clear I’m talking about turning wikilinks off entirely, in the Files and links preferences, which causes regular Markdown links to adopt the behaviour of internal links in every way (at least as far as I know, and as far as your list goes):
- You still type in internal links by starting with [[, and complete them with Enter. So no muscle memory updates.
- Upon doing so they will be formatted as standard links.
- [[target]] ⇒ [target](target)
- [[target|display]] ⇒ [display](target)
- Standard links will be recognised as backlinks, and show up in the graph.
- Since you are using the core WikiMedia syntax to input links, there is also no difference in terms of creating dangling links to sections that don’t exist yet. They will be created when you click on them (that is the main difference to how Scrivener does things).
- Renaming notes will intelligently update internal Markdown links pointing to them. If ‘target’ = ‘display’ then both sides are updated, but if ‘display’ is different, then only the filename side is updated.
It’s what drove me to figure out how to use Obsidian and only Obsidian to write a fantasy novel.
Thanks for posting the video of your working process with it. I’ve definitely heard of people using it for long-form writing. I don’t think I could wrap my head around the process in a practical way. I’m just too wedded to fine-grained detailed outlining as a way of brainstorming, developing, structuring and thinking about long-form text. So it’s interesting to see how this could work for those that do it.
I do agree that it does have the slight edge on Scrivener here and there where it comes to tags and links. It should, of course, since that is pretty much its bread and butter (not having an outliner). I wouldn’t underestimate Scrivener’s agility on those fronts though. This is my biggest annotated round-up of articles and discussion links on using Scrivener in this space. That’s rather a lot, but mainly what I wanted to draw attention to was the section toward the bottom on Linking.
There are some thoughts in there that specifically go over the pros and cons, similarities and differences. Backlinks definitely exist in Scrivener, but it takes that concept to a very different place than most automatically generated approaches do, one that gives you more authority over the product of that concept, at the expense of being purely additive rather than trimmed to the present tense. I.e. Scrivener’s backlinks show everything that does or has linked to the section, until you yourself decide if any of those references are no longer useful.