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Link paste autolink must stay literal inside markdown source entry

docs/solutions/logic-errors/2026-04-11-link-paste-autolink-must-stay-literal-inside-markdown-source-entry.md

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Link paste autolink must stay literal inside markdown source entry

Problem

The link plugin autolinked pasted URLs too eagerly.

That was fine for plain rich-text paste, but wrong inside markdown source entry like [text](...), where the user is clearly building literal markdown rather than asking for a rich link node.

Symptoms

  • Pasting https://google.com after [Example]( produced a link node in the middle of literal markdown source.
  • Once paste autolink was rejected for that context, bare editor tests exposed a second bug: the pasted URL could disappear because the fallback path relied on a downstream insertData implementation that was not always present.

What Didn't Work

  • Treating every pasted valid URL as an autolink candidate regardless of local source-entry context.
  • Rejecting autolink and then blindly falling through to insertData(data), which does not guarantee plain-text insertion in the bare editor test setup.

Solution

Add a default paste guard for markdown link source entry and insert the raw text when a valid URL paste is intentionally kept literal.

ts
const MARKDOWN_LINK_SOURCE_RE = /!?\[[^\]\n]*]\([^)\n]*$/;

const shouldAutoLinkPasteByDefault = (editor, { textBefore }) => {
  if (editor.api.some({ match: { type: [editor.getType(KEYS.codeBlock)] } })) {
    return false;
  }

  if (!editor.api.isCollapsed()) return true;

  return !MARKDOWN_LINK_SOURCE_RE.test(textBefore);
};

Then, for valid URL candidates:

ts
if (isValidPasteUrl) {
  if (canAutoLinkPaste) {
    return upsertLink(...);
  }

  editor.tf.insertText(text);
  return;
}

This keeps default rich-text paste behavior, but preserves literal markdown source entry when the local context makes that intent obvious.

Why This Works

The fix separates two decisions that were previously conflated:

  • whether the pasted text is a valid URL
  • whether the current insertion context should autolink it

Markdown source entry is a real editing context, not noise around the URL. Once the plugin sees [... ]( before the cursor, the right behavior is to keep the URL literal. And when it does that, it must insert the plain text itself instead of assuming another paste handler will always finish the job.

Prevention

  • Do not autolink pasted URLs in contexts that are clearly building literal markdown source.
  • When a plugin deliberately rejects a valid specialized paste path, make sure it still preserves the raw text instead of relying on an implicit downstream fallback.
  • Keep paste regressions covered through withLink.spec.tsx, not only through URL validation tests.