Ignore accents/diacritics in link suggestion, quick switcher, find in file and global search

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 mythologies.

(I agree it’s a surprising omission.)

1 Like

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.

7 Likes

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.

6 Likes

+1
as an Arabic speaker I say: it’s a feature that should be added.

3 Likes

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: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/is-it-possible-to-ignore-accents-on-a-search-i-mean-this-symbol-a-a/96773

So add my +1 to this feature request, sometimes I need to make 3 searches to find the right note.

3 Likes

I’m testing Omnisearch now and it appears to be solving the problem. Thanks a lot, scambier.

5 Likes

+1 Omnisearch works but I’m mostly bothered when linking notes, I’m forced to type around the word like for example the name Fœdora I just type fdora to find it. Happens so often with French

5 Likes

EDIT: there’s a feature request covering this problem here: Ignore accents/diacritics in link suggestion, quick switcher, find in file and global search

Hi, I save nearly all my webclips in English, but I write mostly in Spanish and Catalan, which often use very similar words but with different tildes (I think tilde is the right word, sorry if it isn’t)

For instance, if I want fo quickly find notes about cameras, I end up having to search 3 times :rofl:

  • English: camera
  • Catalan: càmera
  • Spanish: cámara (OK, this one has a different vowel but I can’t think of a better example right now)

I’ve looked for fuzzy search plugins, but I don’t see anything that works on the good old search pane.
I haven’t seen any search syntax either, but I’d swear there was some modifier to achieve what I want.

It would be cool for searches to ignore all the weird things we put above vowels (á, à, ä, â…) it could be useful for other bilingual speakers too, I’m sure I’m not alone in this. Some kind of fuzzy search for similar words, like the example above, could work too.

Any ideas? Should I post a feature request?

And I know it’d be easier to use only one language, but I really need to use those three.

Thank you! :slightly_smiling_face:

2 Likes

The underlying problem may be that you seem to create your accents by merging two characters: one normal English ABC character plus a sign (accent) that will be merged into the other character.
Are you using some keyboard shortcuts to create accented characters on an English only keyboard maybe?
Because if the accented character takes one character length space, then Obsidian will differentiate between accented and non-accented characters.

I may be wrong here but this would be a reasonable explanation.

2 Likes

I think you’re right about the merging. I use a Spanish keyboard, to write á you push the accent key and then the “a” key, I guess this creates a combined character that Obsidian recognizes as distinct.

EDIT: thanks for correcting me, it was accent instead of tilde

1 Like

Or rather, it will match the non-accented ‘a’, ‘n’, etc. all the time.

2 Likes

I really don’t know what’s happening under the hood, but I don’t recall having this problem before.

I’ll try other desktop and text search programs, but I just searched this thread for “cam” on my browser and it found my 3 examples: camera, càmera and cámara.

1 Like

:+1:

There is an existing feature request. ¿We can dream?

3 Likes

I was testing LibreOffice and found the “diacritic-sensitive” setting just now! :rofl:

I was going to search the forum again, now that I know how it’s called. Thank you for finding and sharing the feature request.

3 Likes

I merged your thread into this one. Thanks!

2 Likes

Still very much needed in 2025. Any ETA please ?

Thank you.

1 Like

+1 I can’t find notes in my vault sometimes but then realize that I needed an accented character somewhere in the search query. We should have a way to ignore those (or not).

1 Like

As a workaround, you can avoid the problem by searching using a regular expression (/search term/) and replacing the problematic character with a dot (e.g. /search .erm/)

2 Likes

Sadly, and incredibly, this is still not implemented. Obsidian is one of the most popular programs, and yet it is probably the only note-taking app out there that has this issue.

2 Likes
  • 1 … would be VERY helpful!