mdrefine

links/bare-url ​

Reports bare HTTP and HTTPS URLs, www. addresses, and email addresses in prose. format writes them as autolinks, in angle brackets, where that keeps the same text and destination.

Style rule, fixed by format. Presets: none. Dialects: all. Options: none.

Before, in GitHub:

markdown
See https://example.com.

After:

markdown
See <https://example.com>.

Edge cases and advanced usage ​

Details: CommonMark shows bare addresses as text, so the rule only reports there; GitHub, Forgejo, Gitea, Obsidian, and the VitePress projection already link literal addresses. Fixes bracket only the exact parsed literal extent, with unchanged text and destination, using the conservative character subset of links/allowed-notation. Trailing punctuation excluded from a literal link stays outside the brackets.

Not checked: code, math, HTML, front matter, authored links and images, definitions (including a definition followed by an HTML comment), and angle-delimited addresses, including attempts with spaces.

Reported without a fix:

  • Addresses outside the conservative subset, including www. addresses whose displayed text differs from their destination.
  • An address directly after a backslash or <, or directly before >: adjacent source characters can escape or combine with the new brackets.
  • An address in a heading, in Obsidian, which accepts source heading names, and in Forgejo and Gitea, which support versions with source-based heading IDs. GitHub builds anchors from rendered heading text and VitePress uses inline token content; bracketing these exact literal links preserves both, so headings remain fixable in those two dialects.

Dialect notes ​

In VitePress: addresses next to a preceding letter, digit, _ or +, a following _ or ~, or ending in #, % or @ are also left as written: its linkifier can read these boundaries differently from the literal-link parser.