Leafwiki Devlog #7: v0.6.1 - Introducing Backlinks + Better Search (SQLite FTS5) 🌿

Source: Dev.to

Hi!

It’s time for another update on LeafWiki 🌿

The new version v0.6.1 focuses on two things you use constantly in a wiki:

• Search — fuzzy search & improved ranking
• Backlinks / link UX — introducing backlinks

If you’re new here: LeafWiki is a lightweight, self‑hosted Markdown wiki built as a single Go binary. It’s for people who think in folders, not feeds. LeafWiki stores everything locally — Markdown files on disk, plus a small tree file for structure and metadata. If LeafWiki disappears tomorrow, your content is still yours.

👉 GitHub:

• https://github.com/perber/leafwiki

Backlinks

Backlinks are one of those features that turn a wiki into a knowledge base. They also enable something important: showing the impact of moves and renames—because in a real wiki, pages don’t stay static forever.

LeafWiki follows an explicit approach (similar to working in an IDE): when you rename or move a page, you can decide whether links inside Markdown should be updated as well. (Automatic link updates are planned for a future release.)

Backlinks answer questions like:

• “Where is this page referenced?”
• “Which docs depend on this decision?”
• “What’s connected to this topic?”

What’s included in v0.6.1 (Backlinks & Links)

• Incoming backlinks per page
• Outgoing link list
• Broken links are tracked (so you can see what needs fixing) (A dashboard/overview for broken links is planned for a future release.)
• The link section was intentionally made less visually dominant, so your page content stays the focus

This is the first release where backlinks are properly introduced — I’d love feedback on how you use them.

Search improvements for a Markdown‑based wiki

Search is a daily‑driver feature — if search feels unreliable, a wiki slowly turns into a graveyard. In v0.6.1, I focused on making search feel more reliable and practical during day‑to‑day use.

🛠️ Under the hood: local SQLite FTS5 (no external services)

LeafWiki is file‑based, so search needs to be fast without requiring a separate DB server or Elasticsearch. LeafWiki uses a local SQLite FTS5 index (search.db) and keeps it up to date.

Implementation details

• Parallel indexing: Markdown files are indexed using a small worker pool
• Markdown‑aware indexing: headings are extracted and indexed separately so important sections rank well
• Relevance ranking: results are ordered with BM25 weighting (title > headings > content)
• Better UX: highlighted titles and snippets/excerpts generated directly by FTS
• Fuzzy‑by‑default: normal queries get * wildcards automatically

Optional schema snippet

CREATE VIRTUAL TABLE pages USING fts5(
  title,
  headings,
  content,
  tokenize = "unicode61 tokenchars '-_/+#.'"
);

Feedback welcome

Backlinks can be a deep rabbit hole (graphs, tags, multi‑references, etc.). LeafWiki tries to keep it simple — but useful.

So I’d love to hear:

• Do you use backlinks in your documentation or more for knowledge management?
• Should the link section be more prominent, or is the subtle approach better?

Thanks for following along 🌿