Only the first URL link in an item works

I tried to upload a screen capture video, but it wouldn’t let me. How can I do that?

The problem looks like it’s related to clicking on a line that’s not selected, where the links are not expanded, and when you click on it, it selects the line and expands the links, and then they aren’t in the same place anymore (except for the first one), so the click fails.

Paste the above line into Legend (it’s not possible to type it in). Put the cursor on a different line, so that the links are not expanded. Hovering over either of the links shows a tooltip with “click to open”:

If you click on “apples”, a new tab opens with apple.com. But if you click on “bananas”, the link doesn’t open. In both cases, the line gets selected, and the links shown expanded, with the cursor below the place you clicked, which if you click on “bananas” happens to now be in the middle of the “apples” link:

You might think that the “apples” link would open, but it doesn’t. However, if you command-click on either of the links, either expanded or not, the links do open.

If you right-click on the first link, you get the edit menu with “Edit link”:

It looks like what happens in this particular case is that when you right-click on the second link, the line expands, and the cursor happens to be in the first link now, and the “Edit link” edits the first link. If you add more text so that the cursor isn’t in the first link after expanding:

Then when right-clicking on the second link, you just don’t get the “Edit link” at all, because now the cursor is near “called by”:

I think it might be better if clicking on a link to open it (and maybe right-clicking to edit it) didn’t select the line and expand the links, since that’s not really what you were trying to do. It also prevents you from clicking on other links in the line; you need to remember to command-click them or deselect the line again.

Jay Thanks! I think that works much better now, that clicking on a link opens it without selecting the line for editing.

However, now if the line is selected for editing, it’s not possible anymore to click inside the link to place the cursor there to edit it. Clicking on the link does nothing. You have to place the cursor beside it, and use the arrow keys to go in. You can’t reposition the cursor by clicking. It’s the same regardless of the “show markdown” setting.

There’s another issue, if you have a line that’s only a link, you now need to click to the right of the end of the line to edit it, which I think is fine, it’s not hard to figure out (clicking in the small space at the very beginning also works). But if you have “show markdown” on, when it shows the markdown, the cursor seems to be inside the link, but you can’t type anything, you can’t click anywhere else in the link to move the cursor, and the arrow keys don’t work - they scroll the window instead (similar to the problem I just reported with code blocks, where the cursor is sort of somewhere and nowhere at the same time). But if you then click a second time to the right of the end of the line, the cursor goes there, and then the arrow keys and typing starts working again - but you still can’t click to move the cursor.

Btw, I was comparing the behaviour with [[internal links]]. I know that by design, you can’t edit the text of an internal link, and even when the line is selected for editing, clicking on an internal link opens it. That seems reasonable I guess, even if it’s not consistent with external links. But I noticed it’s possible to move the cursor inside an internal link with the arrow keys. If you type, the first character goes to the right of the link, then further characters to the left. Not a big deal, but a glitch anyway. The arrow keys should probably skip over an internal link all at once.