Athens Weekly for [[January 05, 2022]]
Happy new year and Welcome to the latest edition of [[Athens Weekly]]. The Athens team was on a well deserved break for the holiday season, but made a thumping return with beta 6 of Athens 2.0.
What's new?
Page Aliases
The headlining feature of this week update is support for aliases and it's pretty neat!
If you're familiar with Roam Research or Logseq, you'll be pretty familiar with the concept of aliases. It's pretty much just a way of creating a link without necessarily typing in the title verbatim.
This link displays balance sheet, but if you click on it, it takes you to the page for statement of financial interest, a synonym for balance sheet.
Pretty neat! I see the use for this in linking to pages that already exist, if you desire a different anchor text.
A potential use case is for addressing capitalization differnces; Orange and orange are two separate pages but with aliases, you can link to one while displaying the other. This makes for more seamless linking, less blank pages that aren't necessary while also maintaining better written structure.
To create a Page Alias. Follow the format [alias][[page to be linked to]]
Block Aliases
Along with Page aliases, we've now got block aliases. In much the same manner as page aliases, this allows you to link to another block even if it's not word for word what you mean.
This is arguably even more powerful than page aliases due to the fact that often times individual blocks aren't really reusable due to the intricacies with which two topics may differ.
Similar to how you create a page alias, simple add a set of square brackets in front of the regular link and write the alias text inside those brackets. Follow the format [alias]((Block-ID)).
Bug fixes + More
As I write this newsletter, another release has been cut with some scrumptious bug fixes as well.
We've seen a more permanent fix to a small data loss issue that occurred last month with Filipe adding idle saving while editing a block
Furthermore, we've got fixes for an issue some of us experienced with deleting pages thanks to Sid.
Finally we've got some neat fixes to Real Time Collaboration and youtube embeds which were broken for some people. These should all lead to a smoother experience while using Athens
Tips and Tricks
One cool feature that most people haven’t tried before is a quick way to navigate to a new page while typing.
When you create a page link, simply move your cursor inside of the link and click cmd/ctrl + O
to navigate to the page. If you’d like to open the page in sidebar, use the command cmd/ctrl + shift + O.
Tip: This also works with block references
As always thanks for reading this weeks newsletter. If you have any questions, comments or feedback, just reply to this email or send a message on twitter @aryansawhney17.
Happy thinking,
Sawhney
Loving the speed of updates on Athens! I just wish there was more transparency with spell check. It's such a basic feature that is keeping me from using Athens daily.