Obsidian and Writing

Hide Linked Mentions in Obsidian

Tidy Up Your Dashboard

2 min readSep 12, 2022

Introduction

I have been setting up a dashboard to provide a landing page for my knowledge management system. In this brief post, I will describe how to use CSS snippets to backlinks on a single page.

Backlinks

The automatic generation of backlinks in Obsidian is an extremely useful feature as the links section is automatically populated. In my vault I generally link every note to the Home note (or Dashboard), these links are included in note templates. As every note is linked to Home, the list of backlinks is long and doesn’t add any value as every note is listed.

In the Obsidian settings backlinks can only be turned on or off globally, not on a per-page basis.

CSS snippets

CSS snippets are a mechanism to create small CSS files (typically only containing a single rule) to augment an Obsidian theme. For more details, see Working With CSS in Obsidian

Solution

CSS Snippet

To hide the backlinks displayed on the dashboard, I create a CSS file with the following content in the OBSIDIAN_VAULT/.obsidian/snippets folder.

.dashboard1 .embedded-backlinks {
    display: none;
}

Dashboard Header

The note metadata for the dashboard needs to be updated to include the line, cssclass: dashboard

---
aliases: [Home, home, _Home]
tags:
- type/node
- wip/active
cssclass: dashboard
---

Conclusion

Using a simple CSS snippet, I have been able to make my Dashboard cleaner. This same technique can be applied to any other page where the inclusion of backlinks doesn’t add any value.

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