https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/809503f0-1a39-4567-91f3-258359d5f146

Gremlins for Obsidian

Gremlins reveal invisible characters (inluding curly quations marks and em dashes).

Lightweight and loads under 1ms on most systems.
Can sit in the background - just load and forget.
If you ever paste something that has many unicodes, Gremlins flag them. To replace every flagged character on a line, simply squash the Gremlin by clicking its gutter icon.

Features

• Flags invisible or unusual Unicode characters, mixed indentation, and optionally typographic punctuation (curly quotation marks, en dashes, and em dashes). See details below.
• Shows an icon beside every visible line containing a gremlin (optionally, you can click the icon to fix the character immediatly)
• Works in Source mode and Live Preview.

The plugin checks three groups of rules.

1. Invisible or potentially dangerous Unicode - enabled by default

Unicode	Character	Fix when explicitly requested
U+0003	End of text control	Delete
U+000B	Line tabulation/vertical tab	Newline
U+00A0	Non-breaking space	Ordinary space
U+00AD	Soft hyphen	Delete
U+180E	Mongolian vowel separator	Delete
U+2007	Figure space	Ordinary space
U+200B	Zero-width space	Delete
U+200C	Zero-width non-joiner	Delete
U+200E	Left-to-right mark	Delete
U+200F	Right-to-left mark	Delete
U+2028	Unicode line separator	Newline
U+2029	Unicode paragraph separator	Blank line
U+202A–U+202E	Bidirectional embedding/override controls	Delete
U+202F	Narrow non-breaking space	Ordinary space
U+2060	Word joiner	Delete
U+2066–U+2069	Bidirectional isolate controls	Delete
U+FEFF	Zero-width no-break space/BOM	Delete
U+FFFC	Object replacement character	Delete

Bidirectional controls and invisible characters are highlighted because they can make text appear different from its actual stored order or produce confusing Markdown, searches, and diffs.

2. Mixed indentation - enabled by default

It detects indentation at the beginning of a line containing both tabs and spaces.

When fixed, the indentation becomes spaces while preserving its visual width, assuming four-column tab stops.

It does not flag indentation made entirely from tabs or entirely from spaces.

3. Typographic punctuation - disabled by default

Unicode	Character	Optional replacement
U+2013	En dash –	Hyphen -
U+2014	Em dash —	Hyphen -
U+2018 / U+2019	Curly single quotes ‘ ’	Straight apostrophe '
U+201C / U+201D	Curly double quotes “ ”	Straight quote "

Important

The plugin does not automatically replace anything:

• Click gutter icons to fix is disabled by default.
• Without it, Gremlins only highlights and explains characters.

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.