Obsidian is absolutely perfect in almost every way…save for one problem. Obsidian cannot, will not use the system dictionary. Even when set to English (British), the built-in spell checker insists that the word “organisation” is not spelled correctly. Of course it bloody is!
Sometimes, things like this happen for a good reason. This episode forced me to return to gedit and trawl the Internet for any gedit plugins capable of displaying on-screen word counts.
gedit already includes “Document Statistics” under Settings >> Tools, but that is three clicks away; what about if I want to see these stats as I’m working? It is nice to have a quick glance occasionally at the bottom of the application window for a spot-check of how many words I have in the current document. Like Obsidian has, and like a lot of other modern text editors have.
I don’t know much about making gedit plugins, so I searched and stumbled upon gedit-wordcount-plugin which does exactly what I need it to do.
Reading though the code, it was solid but could do with a few updates and streamlining; it was last updated 13 years ago.
Quick pause: am I saying that gedit is as capable as Obsidian when it comes to writing markdown documents? The short answer is: Yes, provided one knows how to do the basics in markdown. It is not as convenient as Obsidian, with all the right-click formatting menu at one’s fingertips, but for writing markdown? It rocks. I had used it prior to discovering Obsidian, and this very document is written entirely in gedit.
Anyway, the plugin. Downloaded, installed and tested. This was exactly what I wanted. I hard-forked the repository, spun up my own, and set to work to tidy things up.
All-in-all, the original plugin was adequate, but it needed a bit of a spring clean and some performance hardening. Plus, a character counter would be nice.
Available on: my git repository.
Getting back to how gedit compares to Obsidian. BTW, I’m writing this primarily for my own reminder into how I can (should) make better use of the tools I already have, instead of chasing the newest, shiniest thing. Life has taught me that nothing is perfect (even with the new). What is perfect is the ability to adapt and workaround little annoyances like these using the tools which I already have. Must try harder, I did it again with Obsidian!
gedit (now):
- Takes notes.
- Can character and word count on the status bar.
- Already has templates for quick-insert into docs via the core plugin “Snippets”.
- Already has configurable auto-save (I didn’t know this before the above).
- Uses my system dictionary for spell checking; the true and correct British English standard where “Z’s” are not substituted for “S’s” just because we pronounce them as “Z”! (Yeah, that’s below the belt, but I couldn’t resist!)
What else does one need?
- Front matter for Hugo and co? Make a snippet, call it “hugo”. Type in “hugo” then tab and presto! Front matter in.
- Links? Snippet.
- Date / time formatted correctly like
2025-08-02T11:25:11+0000where the time is UTC, no matter where in the world you live? Simple asdate -u +"%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S+0000"via the core plugin “External Tools”.
I’m done.
I’ll write gushing, love poetry about having dreams of gedit another time; not right now. (So embarrassing!)