Is there a 'Follow Link' shortcut of some kind possible?

[MarcusM]

I think Keith wanted to be able to, while browsing a file with keyboard, open a link by simply pressing a keyboard shortcut (rather than by switching to the mouse or having to type part or all of the name of the link). This is something I also wish for, which is how I found this thread – and also this thread which makes a similar request:

Follow a link with the keyboard

This would be super-helpful, and I actually had a similar suggestion, but with a URL globe icon or something equivalent, to make the URL clickable once you’re in a note, or editing an item. Just as an example, in TextMate this is Fn-Enter, when your cursor is anywhere on the URL. Perhaps we could use Ctrl-Enter as a close equivalent. In Sublime Text, this missing functionality was finally added via a plugin.

To further clarify the possibilities of how this feature could work:

Links which can currently be followed with the mouse are:

• Internal links
• External links (in Markdown)
• External links (as just URL)
• Image links
• Tags

Let’s suppose there were a keyboard shortcut, perhaps Ctrl+Enter, which would launch whichever link is “under the cursor”. The most unambiguous way for that to work would be to require the cursor to be somewhere within the link syntax, for example (representing the cursor with a vertical bar):

• #|tag or #t|ag or #ta|g,
  perhaps also |#tag or #tag| if one includes the boundary
  (and why not? I cannot imagine a situation in which two links would exist literally side by side, with no space or other character in between. In the rare case that happened, and the cursor were on the links’ shared boundary, Dynalist could decide arbitrarily, as far as I’m concerned.)

and similarly:

• [lin|k](target) or [link](tar|get) or why not also |[link](target) and [link](target)|
• ![im|age](target) and ![image](tar|get), etc.

A more potentially ambiguous but also useful additional possibility would be for this keyboard shortcut to open a link which is contained in the item where the cursor is, if the cursor is not within (or on the boundary of) a link syntax. For example:

• Item wh|ich contains a [link](target)
• Item which con|tains a link in its note
  http://link.com
• Item which contains a link in its note
  http://lin|k.com

If an item (and its note) contain only one note (between them), then there is no question about which link the user means to open. But if there are multiple links, then it could be ambiguous. Perhaps best would be to open the link which is nearest the cursor. Less useful (in my opinion) would be to resolve the ambiguity by always opening the first link, or no link.

(Besides these possibilities of opening links within the outline, there is the other possibility Keith alluded to, opening bookmarks within the bookmarks list. In my mind, this feature is much less essential, since it is not even possible yet to browse the bookmarks list using the keyboard, or to rearrange the bookmarks in the list. If and when that becomes possible, then it would be a simple and obvious matter to allow the selected bookmark to be opened by pressing Enter.)