double pipe link

Everybody is familiar with the normal pipe link:

[snugglebunny|what you desire]

... which, as we know, links to snugglebunny with a link named "what you desire", just like this: what you desire.
But there is yet another tasty link type, provided for our use: the double pipe link.

[pretzels|tasty treats|Love and Peace]

We are now provided with a third argument. This is the way the link looks like:

tasty treats

The link looks deceptively innocent. Apparently (as confirmed by Dr. Nekojin) the third argument does nothing. But this is not the truth. What really happens is that

¡it appears on dem bones' clouded brows !

So, every time you click on the "tasty treats" link above you are taken to the pretzel node, and "Love and Peace" appears in Helvetica 12 Bold on dem bones' forehead, in fiery letters.
This is why you should use this kind of link with the utmost care; spelling mistakes give him a splitting headache.

More seriously...

A double-pipelink does not, at the time of writing, exist within E2. However, it would be nice if it did. It would enable you to simultaneously provide pipelink commentary (see Pipe links and three-dimensionality), and link to further (different) sources of information. Let me elaborate.

[Julius Caesar|Friends, Romans, countrymen|Friends, noders, Everythingians]!

What you see in the node will be the phrase "Friends, noders, Everythingians" highlighted in blue and underlined, indicating the presence of a hardlink.

What you see when you hold your mouse over the hardlink is a small tooltip, containing the phrase "Friends, Romans, countrymen". This tells you it's a pipelink.

What you get when you click the link is something else again. Instead of searching for "Friends, Romans, countrymen", it searches for the double-pipelinked phrase, which is "Julius Caesar".

[commonly misheard lyrics|kiss the sky|kiss this guy]
[nodes with one letter of difference|I'd like to buy the world a coke|I'd like to buy the world coke]
[Wayne's World|Schwing!|Tia Carrera]

This is entirely possible using ordinary HTML, but not currently achievable within E2 writeups. Then there's the other problem. What if you want to add commentary to a hardlink but don't want to change its destination node? In the absence of a second type of pipelink (may I suggest "¦"?), you can simply do this:

[E2|meme soup|E2]

Problem solved.

Now, I see that it may be a little surprising sometimes to click a double-pipelink expecting one thing and getting another. You could compensate for this by perhaps displaying the true destination in the status bar, though personally I'd probably find that even more annoying. It's not a perfect solution. It's not really that much of a problem in the first place. Ah well. File under "never gonna happen".