Diacritics-Free Search
spenhos176 downloadsSearch and replace ignoring diacritics — Hebrew nikud, Arabic tashkil, Latin accents, and more. Works in active note and vault-wide.
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✨ Diacritics-Free Search
Search and replace text ignoring diacritical marks in Obsidian
Hebrew nikud · Arabic tashkil · Latin accents · Greek polytonic · Any Unicode combining mark
🌐 English | Español | עברית | العربية | Français | Русский | Português
The Problem
If your notes contain vocalized Hebrew like בְּרֵאשִׁית, searching for בראשית (without vowels) won't find it. The same happens with café vs cafe, Arabic بِسْمِ vs بسم, and any other diacritical marks.
Diacritics-Free Search solves this by making all diacritics transparent during search — type without marks and find text that has them.
Search query: בראשית → Finds: בְּרֵאשִׁית ✓
Search query: cafe → Finds: café ✓
Search query: بسم → Finds: بِسْمِ ✓
Features
🔍 Local Search — Find & Replace in Current Note
| Shortcut | Option + F (suggested — assign in Settings → Hotkeys) |
| Behavior | Opens a search bar at the top of the active note (Chrome-style) |
Capabilities:
- Real-time highlighting — All matches highlighted in yellow; current match in orange
- Match navigation — Use ▲▼ buttons or Enter / Shift+Enter to jump between matches
- Scrollbar markers — Yellow ticks on the scrollbar show where matches are (clickable!)
- Replace one / Replace all — Replace the current match or all matches at once
- Case sensitivity toggle — Click "Aa" to switch between case-sensitive and insensitive
- Remembers last search — Reopen the bar and your previous query is still there
- Escape to close — Press Esc from anywhere (even while editing) to dismiss
🌐 Global Search — Search Entire Vault
| Shortcut | Shift + Option + F (suggested — assign in Settings → Hotkeys) |
| Behavior | Opens a modal to search across all markdown files in your vault |
Capabilities:
- Vault-wide search — Scans every
.mdfile in your vault - Highlighted context — Shows the matching line with the found text highlighted
- Click to navigate — Click any result to open the file and jump to the exact match
- Match count per file — See how many matches each file contains
- Global Replace All — Replace a term across all files in one click
- Debounced input — Waits 300ms after you stop typing to avoid lag on large vaults
🎯 How Matching Works
The plugin uses Unicode NFD normalization to decompose characters, then removes all combining marks (Unicode category Mn):
| Original | Normalized | Script |
|---|---|---|
| בְּרֵאשִׁית | בראשית | Hebrew (nikud + cantillation) |
| café | cafe | Latin (acute accent) |
| بِسْمِ ٱللَّهِ | بسم الله | Arabic (tashkil) |
| naïve | naive | Latin (diaeresis) |
| Ἀθῆναι | Αθηναι | Greek (polytonic) |
| résumé | resume | Latin (multiple accents) |
| über | uber | Latin (umlaut) |
💡 Both sides are normalized — if you search with diacritics, it still matches text without them (and vice versa).
⌨️ Keyboard Shortcuts
| Action | Shortcut |
|---|---|
| Open local search | Option + F (suggested — assign in Settings → Hotkeys) |
| Open global search | Shift + Option + F (suggested — assign in Settings → Hotkeys) |
| Next match | Enter or ▼ button |
| Previous match | Shift + Enter or ▲ button |
| Close search | Esc (works from anywhere) |
| Replace current | Enter in replace field |
Both commands are also available via the Command Palette (Cmd + P).
🗂️ Supported Scripts
| Script | Example | What's stripped |
|---|---|---|
| 🇮🇱 Hebrew | בְּרֵאשִׁית → בראשית | Nikud, cantillation marks |
| 🇸🇦 Arabic | بِسْمِ → بسم | Tashkil / harakat |
| 🇫🇷 Latin | café → cafe | Accents, umlauts, cedillas, tildes |
| 🇬🇷 Greek | Ἀθῆναι → Αθηναι | Polytonic accents, breathings |
| 🇷🇺 Cyrillic | й → и | Combining breve |
| 🇮🇳 Devanagari | — | Anusvara, virama, etc. |
| 🌍 Any | — | All Unicode Mn (Mark, Nonspacing) |
Installation
From Obsidian (recommended)
- Open Settings → Community Plugins in Obsidian
- Click Browse and search for "Diacritics-Free Search"
- Click Install, then Enable
Or install in one click: Open in Obsidian →
Manual Installation
- Download
main.jsandmanifest.jsonfrom the latest release - Create folder:
<your-vault>/.obsidian/plugins/diacritics-free-search/ - Place both files inside
- Restart Obsidian
- Go to Settings → Community Plugins → Enable "Diacritics-Free Search"
Building from Source
git clone https://github.com/spenhos/obsidian-diacritics-free-search.git
cd obsidian-diacritics-free-search
npm install
npm run build
Copy main.js + manifest.json to your vault's plugin folder.
Settings
| Setting | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Case sensitive by default | Start searches with case sensitivity enabled | Off |
| Match highlight color | Color used to highlight all matches | #ffd000 |
| Current match color | Color of the currently selected match | #ff8c00 |
| Minimum characters (vault search) | How many characters before the vault search starts | 2 |
| Maximum files shown (vault search) | Limit how many files appear in vault results | 50 |
The whole interface is localized and follows Obsidian's language (English, Español, עברית, العربية, Français, Русский, Português).
Support
If this plugin is useful to you, you can support its development:
Contributing
Issues and PRs are welcome! If you find a script or language where diacritics aren't being properly stripped, please open an issue with an example.
Made with ❤️ for multilingual note-takers