Hey, for people interested, I made a new post that is similar to this, but instead of requesting this for Search, I want it for the Quick Switcher and Internal Links. I understand that doing this for search may have some negative consequences for some people, and maybe that is why the Obsidian team has done nothing about it for many years.
But I think that it is very necessary for the Quick Switcher and Internal Links, and in this case it won’t affect anyone.
If you agree please help me finally solve this annoying issue, thanks.
This is essential feature for many languages, please implement this. I am disappointed to see this issue is not resolved since 2020!!
If this could be detrimental for some users for some reasons, make it an optional setting to ignore diacritics, but please make this.
I want to emphasise that current search is broken and a wastes time a huge time waster. I likely wasted days trying to figure out how I lost notes, when in fact search was just broken.
Do you see the difference between “ü” and “ü”?
The reason you can’t is the reason current search is broken. It violates user expectations - hence, broken.
Well, when you use the standard features on MacOS and long press u you get ü. U+00FC
When you copy from wikipedia you get ü (u + diaresis) U+0075 U+0308
@Obsidian - this has an easy fix. Make diacritics insensitive search the default and provide an option to disable if it adds value to some users. This is an easy fix in terms of both product and engineering and ignoring to ackwnolege how bad the current behavior is not acceptable.
The option to ignore accents/diacritics would be invaluable, really. I keep running into the problem where I think a note doesn’t exist, only to remember to try searching for it with/without diactritics.
I already did some forum searches, so I know there are feature requests regarding these issues, but, honestly, I believe this should be recognized as a bug because it breaks search functionality significantly. The problem I’m describing affects results in both universal searches and when searching inside an individual note.
When searching, I should not need to match diacritics and curly quotes perfectly to see full results. This is annoying, at best, and misleading at worst, delivering no or incomplete results in a way that may not be immediately obvious to the user. This is particularly frustrating when you’re a writer using the Smart Typography plugin or searching quotes saved from books, which almost always use curly quotes and diacritics where appropriate.
Mostly, I believe search should be curly/smart quote and diacritic agnostic or at least be connected to an option for exact or partial matching.
A search for cliche (no diacritic) or cliché (with diacritic) should return the same results.
A search for can't (no curly apostrophe) or can’t (curly) should return the same results.
Getting around this problem on desktop can be annoying. On mobile, it’s so frustrating and flow-breaking that I usually give up entirely.
I totally agree on the need for that kind of feature.
However, I do not agree that it could be considered as a bug. It is definitely a new feature in terms of software development to allow for ignoring diacritics and the different types of quotes.
Licat posted this in one of our Discord Channels, which may serve as an explanation of why this has not been implemented yet. It does not mean this feature is dead in the water, but it is not a simple thing to add.
@Licat
I believe we’ve given an attempt to properly handle diacritic ignoring search but because of unicode complexities (sometimes the accents are separate characters, sometimes they are not), the search result highlighting would get improper character offsets (meaning it would highlight the wrong part of the sentence).
To properly handle it required a lot of compute power which means search would have been significantly slower.
And on top of that, it also completely breaks searching for a couple of languages like hebrew and we had no idea how to fix that, so eventually the initiative was put to the background.
This feature request from 4 years ago is still desperately needed in 2024 : the lack of an option to ignore diacritics is an extremely serious restriction for many languages.
Cannot believe this is still not implemented. It sounds like something not that hard to implement (fuzzy search) and yes we have Omnisearch but it is kinda sluggish and doesn’t replace the search behavior when trying to make links with [[, etc.
Please consider implementing this. I use english, french and spanish and it is a pain when typing something that contains an accent to never find the right note, etc. Thanks
