I gotta agree with you on this one.
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As a workaround I’m adding aliases to every note with special characters but it’s really cumbersome, especially with Vietnamese ones.
Just to give some context as to why this is an issue in the first place: If I write the German character ü on a German keyboard everything is easy. It’s one key press.
For languages like Vietnamese, though, there is no key for each letter. So to type ợ you have to
- Switch to Vietnamese input mode (if you’re not there yet)
- Type
o - Type
w(to get toơ) - Type
j(to add the dot:ợ)
So if you want to search for a note called Phở Gà you have to actually type Phowr gaf and in contrast to a search in English, where your note might already show up after you typed the first couple of characters, in Vietnamese (and other similar languages) it will not because a character like ợ will only be output once you finished typing owj.
Which means that in order to find a Vietnamese note you have to type up to three times as much as to find a similar English one.
1 Like
If you are willing to install community plugins, Omnisearch is a very good one with diacritics search.
My native language is french and I have a lot of notes with “é”, “î”, “è” and many other accent characters and it’s always bad to search something with the native search engine of Obsidian and don’t have any result and have to remember that no result doesn’t mean the note don’t exists.
The only concern about the plugin is because it’s a community plugin so it has access to all my notes which could be a security concern. But the plugin has about 140k download so could be considered as relatively secure based on the popularity factor which is not a decent indicator of security.
I’m constantly thinking about Obsidian synch which is End to End encryption which is very good but introducing a major flaw of security like a community plugin. But Obsidian without community plugin is totally not enough for me and Omnisearch is one of the few exception I choosen like DataView, Excalidraw, AdvancedTables and a couple others.
3 Likes
I’m also having the same issue here in PT-BR.
There are many graphic accents in Portuguese, such as in Convênio or Plano de Saúde, which means Health Care, and when searching for things like these, I’ll always type convenio to search for the file.
Still, Obsidian explicitly requires convênio to find the match. And I still haven’t found a suitable solution without adding too many aliases around my notes.
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+1 . Any updates on this request?
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+1.
Why on earth this isn’t implemented yet? Seriously.
Such an easy thing to add will make the software so much better. It’s insufferable to type in every search box in this state. One must always change the titles of every note or make two search queries for everything. Searching musica doesn’t trigger música, it’s unquestionable for a note taking app of this callibre.
This function is present in every other note taking/text processing software since decades, and Obsidian, having so many updates regularly, still lacks it!
I don’t know why, really.
Please consider to implement this.
Thank you.
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In fact, among all the software I’ve ever used, Obsidian is the very first that I know it doesn’t have this common-sense feature.
Thank you.
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Because, you know, just scan the feature requests category in this forum, check out the roadmap and the changelog?
+1! Would be much appreciated indeed!
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+1 not only for Search but for the Quick Switcher as well (e.g. currently Command+O and typing “noel” doesn’t find “Noël”). Could be a preferences setting.
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1+ for this feature please!
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+1 my current workaround is to add words without diacritics at the end of the file name, can you imagine having all your notes named “Idées idees”, “Opération operation”? Please make this a priority. The thread was opened THREE YEARS ago and this should be pretty straightforward to implement!
6 Likes
+1
Current workaround:
I am french so many of my note would have french accentuated characters is the title and content. For now my workaround which work for titles only is to make use of new properties feature and to create aliases for my notes without accents. This is time consuming and not relevant in a workflow but it works for my use case.
Example:
Title: Bioénergies
Alias: Bioenergies
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Just in case, an easier work around instead of putting them on the title is to use aliases.
For example in a note about “garantias” y add the alias “garantia”
That way you don’t ruin your titles, it’s still extremely tedious because when I want to cite the page it will usually use the invorrect version without the “á”, but it’s still better than putting on title
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It’s absurd and a shame for a notes app to not have implemented something as basic as search not ignoring diacritical characters. It’s the minimum of the minimum.
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This is THE i18n issue with Obsidian… for those of us that use other languages it looks like a bug!
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This is crucial, especially considering that certain languages have official variants of the same word with varying diacritics or none at all. Take “Île” in French as an example.
Additionally, I’ve submitted a related feature request highlighting a similar challenge with plural forms.
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The lack of this diacritic insensitive makes Obsidian very hard to use in multilingual environments.
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It certainly seems like a BUG, because it’s incredible that in plain 2024 a text focused app doesn’t have this expected feature. I still can’t understand why doesn’t this get more attention to the dev team.
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I do a lot of study on ancient languages, this feature would be invaluable.
6 Likes