Make alinks work in blocks

There's a couple ways to do this. The most obvious being moving alinks functionality to a filter option. You could then apply the filter to fields on blocks, terms, vocabulary, nodes, or users.

Word Link has such an option, it's quite similar to Alinks, so it might be a good idea to merge these modules.

It's certainly possible. Have you looked at glossify? That's exactly what glossify does.

Another option is to use views to render a body field as a block. Then alinks should work.