Obsidian freezes when accidentally paste a lot of text into the note title field

Bug reports
1

Steps to reproduce

  1. Click in the note title field. Or create a new note. It should look like this:

    image
    image708×274 2.43 KB

  2. Paste a large amount of text.

  3. Obsidian freezes completely. The larger the text, the longer it will remain frozen.

Did you follow the troubleshooting guide?

Yes

Additional information

In some themes, the bug is much worse (but it still happens without a theme and in a sandbox vault)

This problem may not be that common, but it’s actually annoying, especially if you create a new note (because it is the first field that is automatically selected) and accidentally paste something into it.

The expected behavior should be that this simply doesn’t happen. Perhaps something like this: if the pasted or entered text far exceeds the file name character limit, which is way higher than any limit set by any operating system, the content should be truncated to the limit and an error message should appear.

While analyzing this problem, I noticed that there is not an error message indicating whether you’ve exceeded the character limit for a note’s name. This seems to be another bug.

2

I can’t reproduce.

You didn’t include the output of “Show debug info” in your bug report.

3

I also can’t reproduce. I don’t see any freezing when trying to paste large amounts of text into the title. And on MacOS (1.13.1, installer 1.12.4) I do get an error for too long of a name:

screenshot_2026-06-17_12-11-53

+1 to showing your Show Debug Info. Your version, installer version, and OS would be very crucial info.

4

SYSTEM INFO:
Obsidian version: 1.12.7
Installer version: 1.12.7
Operating system: Windows 11
Login status: not logged in
Language: en
Insider build toggle: off
Live preview: on
Base theme: adapt to system
Community theme: none
Snippets enabled: 0
Restricted mode: on

RECOMMENDATIONS:
none

This is the error message I’m getting. But it’s not the same one that @rigmarole showed. I don’t know why.

image1

The console shows the same error as in the image. I don’t know if this error counts as a message that exceeded the character limit, but to me it doesn’t.

As for the amount of text, I’ve been testing with about 5,000 words.

The original freezing lasted about 10 seconds. However, in a sandbox environment, it 2 to 4 seconds. Technically, the bug is still there, but its impact has been reduced. Why? I think I’ve found the cause: it’s the Style Settings plugin + Baseline theme.

In my vault, I had disabled the theme and the plugin in the plugins section, but the freeze still lasted 10 seconds. I didn’t realize it because to really notice the difference, I had to restart Obsidian or reopen it. Somehow, this combination of the plugin and theme continues to have a negative effect without a proper restart of Obsidian.

I suppose the fact that the bug appears isn’t so much Obsidian’s problem, but rather perhaps some “trace” left by the style settings, since the theme (at least on its own) doesn’t cause problems, although it doesn’t happen with other themes, so, in the end, both (Style Settings and Baseline) contribute to the problem.

In any case, I suppose the bug could be avoided if the app handled this scenario properly in the steps to reproduce. Also, maybe there could be an improvement in how themes or plugins are disabled, but I don’t know; you guys know best.

5

I don’t get any freezing. However, I agree we should probably not allow arbitrary text length in that field.

6

Maybe it’s just a hardware difference. Try using 20,000 words of Lorem Ipsum. Have you tried using the baseline and style settings yet?

7

I don’t try with plugins or themes. I have tried with 5k text

8

I think that is OS-dependent. Different filesystems will have different limitations (I know) and different errors (I assume).