FYI: This awesome plugin recently introduced the feature I needed for the Arabic language GitHub - scambier/obsidian-omnisearch: A search engine that "just works" for Obsidian. Supports OCR and PDF indexing.
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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.
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This doesn’t affect me much personally but I’m adding my voice (which I thought I’d done already but hadn’t) because it is such a surprising omission.
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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) orcliché(with diacritic) should return the same results. - A search for
can't(no curly apostrophe) orcan’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.
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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.
I would recommend you to move this post as a comment of this other post here Ignore accents/diacritics in search
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In addition to Omnisearch, I’m told that Another Quick Searcher handles diacritics this way too.
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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.
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Just bumping, devs please add this feature, I have to rename my notes without accents just to be able to search quickly
add fuzzy accents/diacritics search in Obsidian notes (specially when inputting [[ ]] content)
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You (the developers) can do what Firefox does (find in page). An already-done open-source solution. Adapting it shouldn’t be hard.
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You may also find inspiration from how this plugin already handles it: GitHub - tadashi-aikawa/obsidian-another-quick-switcher: This is an Obsidian plugin which is another choice of Quick switcher.
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+1 I’d like to be able to ignore diacritics in internal links [[…
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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.
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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
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+1 absolute necessity
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+1, please…!
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Unfortunately it’s harder than it sounds. See this earlier comment for some details: Ignore accents/diacritics in link suggestion, quick switcher, find in file and global search - #90 by Sigrunixia.
(I agree it’s a surprising omission.)
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Bump, its kinda anoying for french users. Even our months have accents :o
Taking note is good, but searching and finding informations is crucial. Plugins can do that, like Omnisearch but we lose the ergonomy of the embedded search. I prefer a slower but effective search than a fast but unreliable one.
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In German, it’s possible to write out umlaut as ae=ä, oe=ö, ue=ü, etc but in everyday use, we don’t type this way.
French and other European languages use even more “accents” so there’s a need for a better implementation of accents in Obsidian.
I think it’s “fun” and interesting to implement new features in Obsidian, still sometimes it wouldn’t hurt to roll out only bug fixes and optimizations for a longer period of time and effectively stop to add something new. Obsidian has numerous nice features which could be made more useful like the canvas, slides, graph, better mermaid implementation, a new lib for code syntax highlight, a better switch from live view to preview view and more. But I digress.
Since I use multiple languages every day, my documents use multiple languages as well, which use all kind of accents. A better support for accents is really needed.
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+1
as an Arabic speaker I say: it’s a feature that should be added.
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I just opened a thread asking about this functionality, I didn’t find this one because I didn’t know that the proper word was “diacritic”. Mods, feel free to delete it: Is it possible to ignore accents on a search? (I mean this symbol: á, à)
So add my +1 to this feature request, sometimes I need to make 3 searches to find the right note.
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