Link cards & hover preview

Navigating dense webs of interconnected notes presents a recurring cognitive friction: the penalty of context switching. When reading a strategic brief or preparing for an upcoming client review, you frequently encounter references to prior decisions, technical specifications, or customer case studies.

Clicking a link replaces your active document or spawns a new tab, displacing your reading focus. Returning to your original thought requires back-navigation and re-reading to re-establish your train of thought.

Oyma resolves this friction with integrated Link Cards and Hover Previews implemented in src/renderer/editor/decorations/link-card-format.ts and link-hover-preview.ts. By letting you peek into connected notes and external web references without navigating away, Oyma makes non-linear exploration effortless.

Instant hover previews for [[WikiLinks]]

Whenever your cursor hovers over an internal wikilink in Oyma, a clean, floating popover materializes adjacent to the link token.

The hover preview is not an abridged summary; it renders an authentic preview of the target document:

• Full formatting fidelity: Headings, callout blocks, tables, code snippets, and text highlights render with the exact typography and styling of the primary editor.
• Scrollable reading surface: Move your cursor directly into the popover to scroll through long-form documents. You can review an entire three-page technical runbook without ever leaving your current paragraph.
• Nested hover exploration: Links within the preview popover are themselves interactive, allowing you to preview secondary references before deciding whether to open a document into a dedicated workspace tab.
• Immediate navigation shortcuts: If you realize you need to edit the referenced document, pressing ⌘Click or clicking the popover header immediately opens the note in the live-preview Markdown editor.

This popover mechanism allows you to verify facts, cross-check meeting outcomes, and review project requirements in seconds, maintaining unbroken reading velocity.

Visual link cards for external web references

Plain blue underline URLs (https://example.com/long-cryptic-path/12345) clutter clean documentation and provide zero semantic clues regarding the destination content.

Oyma enhances external links with optional rich visual Link Cards:

1. Clean metadata extraction: When you paste a URL on an empty line, Oyma retrieves standard Open Graph metadata—including the page title, publisher site name, description snippet, and favicon.
2. Compact card layout: The URL transforms into a beautifully styled, compact card containing the article title, site domain, and summary teaser.
3. Zero tracking scripts: Unlike embed widgets from third-party services that inject tracking pixels and iframe cookies into your workspace, Oyma extracts metadata statically. No third-party JavaScript executes inside your note.
4. Pure Markdown preservation: On disk, the link remains standard CommonMark syntax ([Title](https://...)), ensuring total portability across any text editor or static site generator.

If you prefer compact inline references, holding Shift while pasting preserves raw URL text, giving you complete control over document density.

Preserving reading flow across meeting archives

Hover previews deliver immense value when reviewing historical meeting documentation. When you record discussions using our zero-bot meeting recording and synthesize outcomes with local AI, meeting records naturally reference project files, client rosters, and daily notes.

When preparing for an executive catchup, you can hover over attendee links to review their recent deliverables, peek into action item notes to confirm completed milestones, and skim previous discussion summaries without opening dozens of cluttered tabs.

Privacy-first web card fetching

Many markdown editors rely on third-party cloud microservices to generate link previews. When you paste a URL into those tools, the link is dispatched to an external server that fetches the page on your behalf, logging your IP address and browsing interests in corporate telemetry stores.

Oyma handles web card resolution strictly on-device:

• Direct client request: If you choose to enable link cards for web URLs, your Mac issues a direct HTTPS request to the target domain, fetching only the initial HTML <head> markup needed to parse Open Graph tags.
• No external proxying: Requests travel directly from your computer to the destination web server without routing through an intermediate Oyma proxy or caching relay.
• Air-gap compliance: When you enable local-only mode, link card web resolution is disabled immediately, ensuring zero outbound network traffic occurs while preserving internal hover previews for your local vault notes.

Performance and accessibility on macOS

Every preview surface in Oyma is engineered for responsive performance:

• Local cache acceleration: Internal note previews pull directly from high-speed memory caches managed by our full-text search indexer, eliminating disk I/O latency.
• Smart viewport boundary awareness: Popovers automatically position themselves above, below, or alongside links to avoid clipping against macOS window borders or menu bars.
• Keyboard accessibility: Pressing ⌥Space while your text cursor rests on a wikilink invokes the preview popover directly from the keyboard, ensuring complete navigation for keyboard-first and VoiceOver users.
• VoiceOver screen reading: VoiceOver announces the target document title and summary when focusing a link card, providing full equivalence for non-visual workflows.

Read, explore, and connect your knowledge with frictionless fluid previews in Oyma.