Feature Request: Setting to Configure How Spaces In Tags Are Dealt With During Export

I like to use Bear as a quick capture tool that I then contribute to Obsidian. The main issue is that Bear allows spaces in their tags, and Obsidian doesn’t.

I would still like to use spaces in tags.

The proposed feature request would be a setting, under “Keep tags during export”, where if the latter is enabled, it will show a text input with the following label: “Replace spaces with:”

  • If left empty, the space isn’t replaced with anything.
  • If the space is replaced with a “dash”, then when the notes are exported, all tags will have a dash instead of a space.
  • It will also remove the right hashtag that’s used to allow the space in Bear.

Please forgive me for a little provocation but, why not ask Obsidian devs to support spaces in tags?

Some asked for an Obsidian exporter and I understand that might concern the path and naming of attachments, but this sounds like a limitation that can be overcome by other people or eventually with tag renaming in Bear.

2 Likes

I agree with trix here. Given how extensible Obsidian is, you might even find someone willing to write a plugin enabling spaces in tags.

I don’t think that would work. Tags are a core feature of Obsidian, and I believe that core features are immutable. Plugins have to be able to work with core features to function correctly, so a plugin that allows spaces in tags would most likely break the editor.

Besides, renaming all my Bear tags with dashes instead of spaces is simpler. The problem is I don’t know if doing so is going to make them harder to search within Bear. I put spaces in the first place because I was under the impression that the search functionality benefited from natural spacing.

For instance, if I put a dash instead, my search query would have to be “how-to” instead of “how to.”

For reference, here is the doc on tags with spaces for Obsidian.

if your search is how to (and not #how to#) the search should produce notes with matches of both the strings how and to so it should work as expected.

Meh. I don’t like the look of it. Looks like we’re going to have to postpone the Bear 2 project another 20 years to implement my feature request lol

But in all seriousness, I’ve been brainstorming a solution that can handle going into Bear notes using its URL scheme and exporting the notes. I’m edging towards using an Apple shortcut since they have x-callback-url support baked in.