description: Reference-style and inline footnotes.

SilverBullet supports footnotes in two flavors: classic reference-style footnotes and inline footnotes. Both are rendered as a small widget in Live Preview and show their content on hover.

Reference-style footnotes

A reference uses [^label] and is paired with a definition [^label]: body somewhere in the same page. Labels can be any string without whitespace or ].

Here is some text with a footnote.[^example] And a longer one.[^longer]

[^example]: This is the footnote body. [^longer]: A footnote body can span multiple lines, as long as continuation lines are indented by at least four spaces (or one tab).

Blank lines are allowed between continuation paragraphs, and **markdown**
inside the body is parsed and rendered.

The definition can appear anywhere in the page (top, bottom, or interleaved). It is conventional to put them at the bottom.

Inline footnotes

Inline footnotes use ^[content] and place the body right at the call site:

This claim has an inline footnote.^[Inline footnotes don't need a separate definition.]

The content is parsed as inline markdown.

Editor behavior

• In Live Preview, a footnote reference renders as a compact … widget. Move the cursor into it to see and edit the raw [^label] source.
• Hover over a reference to see the rendered footnote body in a tooltip. For an undefined reference, the tooltip shows an error.
• Click a reference to jump to its definition. Alt-click moves the cursor into the marker for editing instead.
• Unresolved references (no matching definition) are styled distinctly so you can spot them.
• Typing [^ triggers completion suggesting all footnote labels already defined on the page.