One of the things I missed while using Craft was aliases. Instead of having a single note that referenced a few related spellings of a word, or strongly related topics, with Craft you had to have individual notes for each spelling.
Today I’ll show you how you can use aliases to stop this duplication.
Aliases are part of the YAML markup language that can be used in the beginning of your document to define different parameters. While you can also define tags and other things, we’ll stick with aliases.
Let’s say I have a file for my wife Cynthia. She’ll get mentioned in daily notes, among other places in my writing. Cynthia is also my wife, so I want to be able to use either wife or Cynthia to refer to her. To do this I simply need to add the alias to the top of the file named Cynthia.
---
aliases: wife
---
Now I can use either of those two terms to refer to her. But I’m not restricted to a single alias, I can use as many as I want. So maybe I could use the nicknames my wife has used.
---
aliases: wife, Riedel
---
You can also use multi-word aliases as well if you use quotes around the multiple words so 'this is an alias' as well.
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Another practical use for this is when I want to link to Obsidian in my notes. I can use multiple terms to refer to Obsidian depending on the way I want my documents to read. You can see the top of the note than refers to Obsidian below.
---
tags: app
aliases:
- "Obsidian markdown"
- "Obsidian notes"
---
Aliases are a very powerful feature that I use regularly in my research.