Link Effects

The theme offers effects for your linked links.

You can define additional custom link effects and set defaults in your configuration.

The default link effects shipped with the theme are

Name	Description
download	Causes the linked resource to be downloaded instead of shown in your browser. - `false`: a usual link sending you to the location in your browser - `true`: a link to download the resource - <string>: a link to download the resource with the given filename
target	Whether to show the link in a separate browser tab. - `false`: shown in the same tab - <string>: a valid `a` `target` value If `externalLinkTarget` is configured and the URL is external, this will overwrite the link effect value of your `hugo.toml` and page’s front matter but can still be overwritten in the URL query parameter.

One way to use them is to add them as URL query parameter to each individual link.

This can become cumbersome to be done consistently for the whole site. Instead, you can configure the defaults in your hugo.toml as well as overriding these defaults in a page’s front matter.

Explicitly set URL query parameter will override the defaults set for a page or your site.

If an effect accepts boolean values, only setting the parameter name without a value in the URL will set it to true.

Without any settings in your hugo.toml linkEffects defaults to

[linkEffects]
  download = false
  target = false

linkEffects:
  download: false
  target: false

{
   "linkEffects": {
      "download": false,
      "target": false
   }
}

Front Matter This can be overridden in a pages front matter for example by

+++
[linkEffects]
  target = '_blank'
+++

---
linkEffects:
  target: _blank
---

{
   "linkEffects": {
      "target": "_blank"
   }
}

Or by explicitly override settings by URL query parameter

[Magic in new window](images/magic.gif?target=_self)

The settings applied to the above link would be

download = false
target = '_self'

download: false
target: _self

{
   "download": false,
   "target": "_self"
}