# Impossible to use alias while linking notes in a table

**URL:** <https://community.bear.app/t/impossible-to-use-alias-while-linking-notes-in-a-table/18302>\
**Category:** Bear Bug Report\
**Created:** [October 4, 2025, 4:37am UTC](https://community.bear.app/t/impossible-to-use-alias-while-linking-notes-in-a-table/18302 "2025-10-04T04:37:12Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![aphelia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/a183cd/32.png) [@aphelia](https://community.bear.app/u/aphelia)\
**Post date:** [October 4, 2025, 4:37am UTC](https://community.bear.app/t/impossible-to-use-alias-while-linking-notes-in-a-table/18302/1 "2025-10-04T04:37:12Z")

</div>

- **Bear Version** : 2.6.1 (13751)
- **OS Version** : 26.1
- **What were you doing** : Trying to add an alias to a linked heading in a table
- **What feature did you use** : Linking + Alias + Table
- **What happened** : I can’t add alias as it keeps adding \ before every word I type.
- **What did you expect to happen** : Alias should be inserted.

 ![image](https://europe1.discourse-cdn.com/flex013/uploads/bear/original/2X/e/e674e9bccd3f276061b153875a34f868bcfba5fc.png)

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![rexikan](https://dub1.discourse-cdn.com/flex013/user_avatar/community.bear.app/rexikan/32/4117_2.png) [@rexikan](https://community.bear.app/u/rexikan)\
**Post date:** [October 4, 2025, 11:27am UTC](https://community.bear.app/t/impossible-to-use-alias-while-linking-notes-in-a-table/18302/2 "2025-10-04T11:27:25Z")

</div>

Yes, the `|` automatically gets escaped inside tables to not break the table syntax. And since it is escaped it doesn’t do the job in the wikilink either.

I notice that Obsidian recognizes even escaped `|` as an alias divider, so that could be a solution.

We will think about it and see what we can do. Thanks for reporting!

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![rexikan](https://dub1.discourse-cdn.com/flex013/user_avatar/community.bear.app/rexikan/32/4117_2.png) [@rexikan](https://community.bear.app/u/rexikan)\
**Post date:** [October 7, 2025, 3:10pm UTC](https://community.bear.app/t/impossible-to-use-alias-while-linking-notes-in-a-table/18302/3 "2025-10-07T15:10:19Z")

</div>

We have discussed this issue, and we don’t have a good solution for it:

If we did as Obsidian and accepted escaped pipes as an alias divider, then one couldn’t link to titles that contain a pipe character. That doesn’t seem like a good tradeoff.

We could change the markdown parser to allow unescaped pipes inside wikilinks inside table cells. This is a decent solution, but it would break export of tables as other tools wouldn’t support it. Also, it is a non-trivial change as tables are parsed before wikilinks.

So, unless we get a lot of pushback, we will probably leave it as is, not supporting aliases in wikilinks when inside a table.