Use case or problem
Assuming I write a note, and use bold/italics as formatting.
Currently, the formatting characters for bold and italics are regarded as normal characters by the search. Meaning, in order to find the above “bold/italics” in a file, I must actually search for “**bold**/_italics_”
This means that formatting can drastically hinder searchability, unless you know how you formatted your notes. While everyone probably has their own convention as to when they use bold/italics, I’d argue this to still be a massive oversight.
Proposed solution
I believe Obsidian should (at least allow to) change the search internally to disregard formatting during search. Treat the doc as pure plaintext and strip out formatting from being a necessity. No normal text processor makes a difference. I just checked and RStudio also does do this, but I still think it’s detrimental.
Workaround
None yet. The only somewhat feasonable, but still way too exhausting idea would be to employ RegEx (by using any one of the several community regex search plugins).
Sure, with enough time I can probably figure out a regex pattern that ignores such formatting, but that’s utterly impractical.
The problem here is that you’d have to build the pattern every single time, or store it outside obsidian somehow to quickly adapt it, since Obsidian doesn’t store past search queries.
I’d also not assume every user of obsidian to know how to build basic, or even advanced regex needles.
Thank you
Sincerely,
~Gw