Markdown reference links screencast

I made a short screencast of me using the Markdown reference link scripts I’ve shown in the last two posts. There’s no sound; the narration is typed on screen.

A few notes:

Here’s the text that appears on the screen during the video.

This is a screen recording to demonstrate how I use my Markdown reference link scripts.

Let’s say I want to link to the Google home page. If the text I want to use as the link is already in the document, I can just select it and call the New Reference Link command, either from the Scripts menu or through the ⌃L keyboard shortcut. I type (or paste) the URL into the dialog box, and the script runs, adding the reference to the bottom of the document and turning the selected text into a link.

On the other hand, if I haven’t typed the link text yet, I can invoke that same New Reference Link script, and it’ll insert a blank link that I can type the link text into: like this link to

When the URLs I want to link to are already in the document, I call the Old Reference link command, which is invoked through the menu or through ⌃⌥L. If the link text is in the document, I select it, call Old Reference Link, and choose the URL from the dropdown menu. Here’s an example of a link to a post on Nathan Grigg’s blog.

If the link text isn’t in the document, I can still call Old Reference Link, and it will add a blank link to the selected URL, with the cursor between the brackets waiting for me to type the link text, like this link to

That’s all!