This comes up quite regularly among my users. Even for me it is rather annoying to always have to type full paths - the common case in our (including my) workflow seems to be to link to sub-pages, which becomes unnecessarily cumbersome in Phriction. Additionally this is contrary to experience with well known filesystem functions like symlinks, for example.

Thus I would urge again to have at least an option to make these links relative by default, and require absolute paths to be prefixed with /.

@epriestley Can I write and submit a patch for this?

Roughly my thoughts are:

• When a wiki link starts with ./, treat it as relative.
• For relative links, removing the leading ./ and split on /.
• Get the current Phriction path as the starting point, and split on /.
• Append each item from the relative link array onto the Phriction path unless it's .., in which case pop the last item.
• Join it all back together again with / to convert it into an absolute link.
• Let that absolute path go through the rest of the pipeline.

That seems reasonable to me. I like using ./ to opt in to this and not making it the default.

(If the current page isn't a Phriction page, I guess just don't mark the thing up?)

Yeah that was my plan; relative links on non-Phriction pages just won't get marked up.

Cool. Yeah, that all sounds good to me.

Also, I don't know if this actually ends up being adjacent or if we even have a task for it, but three possibly-related things are:

• If /w/x/ exists and is titled "History of X", it would be nice if [[ x ]] generated a link with the text "History of X" instead of a link with the text "x". Today, you must do [[ x | History of X ]] to get the proper link text.
• If /w/y/ does not exist, it would be nice if [[ y ]] generated a red link to indicate that the page does not exist.
• Stretching here, but if /w/z/ exists and the viewer does not have permission to see it, it would be nice if [[ z ]] generated a grey link with a icon.

I don't know if those are like 5 seconds of work or in a totally unrelated section of the codebase.

• If /w/x/ exists and is titled "History of X", it would be nice if [[ x ]] generated a link with the text "History of X" instead of a link with the text "x". Today, you must do [[ x | History of X ]] to get the proper link text.

Ah yeah, I was going to file a task about that; the existing behaviour annoys on a daily basis.

It's pretty easy to change, it's right next to the relative link code where it determines the default name; I'll look at the object lookup remarkup rule (the one that is used for e.g. T1234) to see what the most optimal way of querying the title of the page is.

• If /w/y/ does not exist, it would be nice if [[ y ]] generated a red link to indicate that the page does not exist.
• Stretching here, but if /w/z/ exists and the viewer does not have permission to see it, it would be nice if [[ z ]] generated a grey link with a icon.

If I do the title querying thing, then we basically get these for free.