[Feature Request] Automatically turn plain URL into link/anchor in Markdown

[andrii-kravets-x]

I would like to turn plain URLs appearing in markdown source code into a elements, like most Markdown implementations do. I particularily like doing this for footnotes, where a plain clickable link is usually expected rather than obscuring the link target with a custom name. Currently I have to repeat myself by giving the same name and target to the link. This is very slightly annoying since there’s hardly any reason to not auto-link plaintext URLs.

In case I didn’t miss an obvious way to do this, is this a feature you’d be interested in implementing, as an opt-in or opt-out [markdown] config option?

Writing link 2 times is pretty annoying(

source: https://zola.discourse.group/t/automatically-turn-plain-url-into-link-anchor-in-markdown/2599

[Keats]

Which CommonMark implementations automatically create links for URLs? That's not the default anywhere afaik, you have to use the <some-url> syntax from the spec.

[andrii-kravets-x]

AFAIK auto-linking bare URLs works here:

• GitHub Flavored Markdown (GFM) 🙃 - this message itself contains such a link that will be rendered nicely
• GitLab Flavored Markdown - https://docs.gitlab.com/user/markdown/#url-auto-linking
• VS Code itself uses Markdown-it (a JS Markdown parser) for rendering .md previews (more like GFM-compatible)

[Keats]

It would need to be added to pulldown-cmark first and then it can be added as an option in Zola

[psomani16k]

There is a markdown-it rewrite in rust that offers an extremely customizable parser design (albeit a little slower), what are your thoughts on a migration?

[andrii-kravets-x]

fyi: there is an open issue in pulldown-cmark repo regarding bare URLs support

[Keats]

The pulldown-cmark is much more battle tested so I won't move anytime soon

[psomani16k]

Makes sense @Keats - reason for asking was markdown-it's extensibility