Actually, if you look back to my previous post, I was very careful to note for you that Safari can share (via the share sheet) more than just the URL (when sharing a link) and other apps cannot. I am guessing you are accessing X, née Twitter, via an app rather than via Safari. If so, that exactly explains your observation.
I think that presents the following options for you:
- Accept the limitations as they stand, and manually amend the URL when captured in the share sheet pop up for Drafts (shown above in one of the screenshots) to manually make it a Markdown link.
- Use a different share option and somehow automate the conversion of the URL into a Markdown link that is then shared into Drafts.
- Build a new Drafts syntax that makes every URL a live link.
- Use another app, which will have the same share limitations, but might have live links by default.
- Option 1 is a viable but hardly a nice solution. I know I wouldn’t settle for that if I were regularly wanting to share from other apps and still have links tappable by default.
- Option 3 I think is possible, but for anyone who has ever dug into regular expressions for matching arbitrary URLs (something I have done) will know that this can be challenging to perfect for all circumstances (avoiding false matches and getting all necessary matches) and I can imagine that for some lengthier drafts, this could also have a performance impact. But, I would defer to Greg for his insights on that.
- i.e., Markdown link syntax is standard and much easier to match against than picking all possible URLs out of free format text.
- Option 4 is always an option, and if this is purely for link bookmarking, and you are not then processing or adding to it in Drafts, then you may find switching to a dedicated link manager/service will give you a better experience - link management being the focus of such an app/service’s functionality.
For a true evaluation against option 4, we would need to understand what “action” can mean in your workflow. At the moment we just don’t have any sort of detail to give further guidance.
Now, you may have noticed above that I I skipped option 2. That was because option 2 is actually relatively straight forward to create and I didn’t want to avoid looking at all the options for you to some level.
If you download and install the following Apple Shortcuts shortcut, it will be available to you (as “URL to MD URL in Drafts”) in the share sheet when you are sharing URLs from an application.
It takes the URL it is passed and grabs the content from that URL. It extracts the page title (assuming there is a page to extract the title of at the end of the URL), and then builds a Markdown link using that title and the original URL. After that it creates a new draft containing that link (and explicitly set to use the “Markdown+Links” syntax … just because I could specify it, but you could even have another default syntax and this shortcut would still set the syntax correctly in Drafts for the share to a new draft).
Because it has to get the page title, this may be a slightly slower sharing process than via the direct to Drafts approach shown above. While you are avoiding the need to tap on the Save button, you might have to scroll down a little to get to the shortcut on the share sheet, and it will probably take a perceivable moment to retrieve the page title.
I logged into X especially to try this out for your example scenario, and sharing out from the iOS app via my shortcut resulted in a draft with the following content.
[1727914875094176137](https://x.com/heyronir/status/1727914875094176137?s=12&t=x1P19gxmwEPQe3OnMkh2kw)
Tapping on the title then opened the iOS app to the referenced post, just as you might expect.
That’s the original request met, and your subsequent particular case for sharing a link out of X covered too. How close is this now to doing what you expect?