Gremlins for Obsidian

Gremlins reveals invisible or easily confused characters in Obsidian's Markdown editor.

Features

• Draws a red bar over zero-width and bidirectional control characters.
• Highlights non-breaking spaces, soft hyphens, and similar characters.
• Warns when leading indentation mixes tabs and ordinary spaces.
• Optionally highlights curly quotation marks and en dashes.
• Shows a bug icon beside every visible line containing a gremlin.
• Optionally fixes every gremlin on a line by selecting its bug icon.
• Describes the character, Unicode code point, and severity on hover.
• Provides Gremlins: Inspect current gremlin and Gremlins: Fix current line for keyboard and touch use.

The plugin works in Source mode and Live Preview. Typographic punctuation and click-to-fix are disabled by default because prose punctuation can be valid and text replacement should be opt-in. Click-to-fix normalizes spacing and punctuation, removes flagged invisible controls, and clears every gremlin from the selected line.

Inspiration

This plugin is independently implemented for Obsidian and inspired by Gremlins tracker for Visual Studio Code, released under the MIT License by Nicolas Hoizey.