Backlink Used to Work

When following an internal link (flagged by the “J” icon), the toolbar used to show a left-arrow at the left side. Clicking this arrow would return to the previous location.

All of a sudden, the previous-location arrow vanishes from the toolbar.

After I click an internal link, the target location is displayed and the toolbar contains the previous-location button for about 1/4 second and then the toolbar is redrawn without the back arrow.

What is going on and how do I get navigate-back to work again?

I’m on Joplin 1.0.160 (prod, darwin)

I cannot replicate this. Does it do it on all the links you’ve tried or only some? If it does it for some in particular, could you export the target note as JEX and post it somewhere?

Thank you for checking. It happens sometimes.

New observation: Whenever the back-arrow is present, the note-name panel auto scrolls to the correct note-name. Whenever the back-arrow is missing, the note-name panel does NOT auto scroll to any note-name.

New observation: It is not tied to the target note. It depends on how I get there. e.g.

  • I’m viewing note “How Gigabit Ethernet Circuits Get Installed at a Call Center”
  • I click on a “Phoenix” internal link. I do not get a back-arrow.
  • I click on an “IOS” internal link. I get the back-arrow.
  • I click on a “Phoenix” internal link. I DO get a back-arrow.

I restarted Joplin and I get the same behavior.

I cut down all 3 of the notes mentioned above so that they contain just a few lines of text and the internal hyperlink, and I get the same behavior.

The notebook is large. Maybe 1000 notes or so. I backed it up, deleted it, imported just the 3 notes, and the back arrow works.

Then I deleted the 3 notes and re-loaded the backup, and the back-arrow problem returns.

If you want to see the entire notebook, let me know. (It is large-ish.)

New observation: If I start with the problem notebook and I delete all other notes except for the three mentioned above, the problem vanishes.

Yes could you actually upload the notebook JEX file? I think it might help replicating it more consistently.

Got it. I can reproduce it with just the Welcome notebook.

  • Copy a Markdown Link for the Tips note.
  • Paste it near the top of the “Welcome to Joplin!” note.
  • Do a search from the search-all field for Welcome. It will find the “Welcome to Joplin!” note.
  • Click the link to Tips.

The problem does not manifest if I simply select the Welcome note via the notes list.

I deleted Joplin and .config/joplin-desktop, re-installed Joplin from the .dmg. I can reproduce the problem this way, so you should also be able to see it.

It appears that one cannot jump back to a note which was found via search. While I understand that navigating back to the search results might be difficult, I sure would like to navigate back to the NOTE from which I linked.

2 Likes

Thanks for the info @kleinfelter, it’s now tracked on GitHub - https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/issues/1727

1 Like

Super. Thanks! (Sorry, if I’d been sure it was a bug I could have opened the GitHub issue myself.)

I see the fix is in the new release. Thank you!