What I’m trying to do
I’m trying to input special characters using the Compose key on Gnome. For instance:
- [Compose] + ‘ + e → é
- [Compose] + ~ + n → ñ
It does not work in the Obsidian editor, though.
Does anyone know a workaround? Or understand why the bug was closed? Thanks!
Things I have tried
There’s this bug report that was closed and had some kind of troubleshooting:
- I can use the compose key on CodeMIrror easily
- I have tried disabling autocompletion, vim mode and other editor features. Still isn’t working.
- I am not using Flatpak.
In Linux as well as Windows, you can choose region/language and keyboards (currently I use US keyboard with my native language with similar diacritics). Add this as a method to ask AI (ChatGPT, Claude, whatever) how to go about it, so it can tell you to click what in what Linux distro you have.
If I had to use Compose (I don’t use Gnome on Linux) like you proposed, I’d go mad after the third char. Not only that these doubly created characters may not even be searchable in some cases (although Obsidian Codemirror supports this since 2-3 years ago minimum).
Anyway, forget that method is what I’m saying and just go for proper locale settings.
I’m aware of the locale settings, I use multiple of them (EN and JP). But most of the time I’m writing English with a US layout and need to input the odd word in Spanish here and there.
Switching locales feels way messier than using the compose key. And since this works in CodeMirror I’m not sure why it’s disabled in Obsidian.
Well, Japanese creates a whole different situation, but if you don’t type in Japanese, how about using Spanish all the time as all English letters are in the Spanish alphabet (I reckon). Not sure if Y and Z will be flipped like in my case (in my keyboard you press z and get y and vice versa) or where the extra chars are added for Spanish.
Then you can try to use text expanders in Obsidian (Typing Transformer or any other) (rule: manana → mañana) or better, OS-Wide, e.g. Espanso? Espanso would be better if you spend a lot of time in other apps as well.
In Obsidian you can set more than one language for spellchecking so you can write without diacritics and handle the spelling mistakes later, even with some AI plugin.
As for what Obsidian hinders in what way, I do not know. I’m not staff. Just throwing things up here.
I think there may be some easier solution, but Japanese threw me now.
not possible either because the English layout is so much better for coding (lots of special characters used in programming are more difficult to reach with a Spanish layout), which is my main job 
I need to type in Japanese as well because I’m learning the language and use Obsidian to write syntax structures, vocab, etc.
Any case, thanks a lot for the help. I’ll try to re-report the bug