Have spell check only enabled on paragraph currently being edited

Feature requests
1

Use case or problem

Spell check is a useful feature, but sometimes it feels very annoying to see many red underlines around a file in edit mode. I believe this issue has prompted many requests in the past to tweak the behavior of spell check (or want to turn it off completely), including:

  • https://forum.obsidian.md/t/better-spell-check/46850
  • https://forum.obsidian.md/t/per-note-spell-check-as-opposed-to-globally-on-or-off/35462
  • https://forum.obsidian.md/t/haw-can-you-turn-off-spell-check/103330

(I can’t include link in my post currently.)

Proposed solution

I think there is a middle ground between just having it enabled vs. disabled, that is to have it active only for the current paragraph being edited.

Majority of the time, people really only care about misspelling they just make, and they can correct it immediately. If an unknown word is left in a previous paragraph, for example, chances are that it’s intended. It may be a proper noun or an acronym that is rare enough that they don’t want to pollute their dictionary with it. So activating spell check only on current paragraph could continue to serve the main use case, but significant reduce visual noise for unknown words intentionally left elsewhere.

Roam, for example, only enables editability for the current item, so items not being edited don’t get spell checked.

Current workaround (optional)

The only workaround is one of

  • completely disable spell check
  • add every unknown word into the dictionary
  • ignore it

I don’t think any of them is ideal.

2 Likes
2

Seconding this. It’s not make-or-break, but it would be a great small QOL if possible.

My current workaround is the “adding every unknown word into the dictionary.” As I am using this as a writing tool for a fictional world, there are a lot of words like this…

3

Let me try linking the posts again: