# How to open link in new tab in Markdown?

Markdown is a great lightweight markup language. The Markdown can be used for everything. People use it to create websites, documents, notes, books, presentations, email messages, and technical documentation.

To create a link in Markdown, enclose the link text in brackets and follow it immediately with the URL in parentheses.

```md
[example.com](https://example.com/)
```

The above will give us this -> [example.com](http://example.com)

But if you click on the link, you will notice that it opens the link in the same tab as this article. It’s great if I want to refer to other articles within this website, but when I am referring to another website, I want it to open the link in another tab.

I want this -> [example.com](http://example.com)

So, there are a couple of solutions to achieve this.

### Solution 1: Using anchor tags

```html
<a href="https://example.com/" target="_self">example.com</a>
```

The only downside is that your Markdown document is no longer purely Markdown as it contains HTML.

### Solution 2: Using a base element

```html
<base target="_blank" />
```

You can place this at the top of the markdown page. This will add `target=“_blank”` to every link on your page.

### Solution 3: Using `rehype-external-links`

Install the `rehype-external-links` plugin.

```shell
npm install rehype-external-links
```

Import the plugin into your `astro.config.mjs` file.

```js
// ...
import rehypeExternalLinks from "rehype-external-links";

export default defineConfig({
  // ...
  markdown: {
    rehypePlugins: [
      [
        rehypeExternalLinks,
        {
          target: "_blank",
        },
      ],
    ],
  },
});
```

This will add `target="_blank"` to all links that are linked to external sources.

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**Original post**: [How to open link in new tab in markdown?](https://hyperoot.dev/posts/how-to-open-link-in-new-tab-in-markdown/) on [hyperoot.dev](https://hyperoot.dev/).

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