Bamboo

Bamboo splits cleanly at its nodes, so should your words.

Bamboo patches Obsidian's built-in CodeMirror editor to use proper word segmentation for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK) text.

Comparison

In my experience, Bamboo produces better splits, but Word Splitting is the long-standing plugin for Chinese word splitting. Here's how the two compare:

	Bamboo	Word Splitting
Languages	Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean	Simplified Chinese
Segmentation engine	Intl.Segmenter with regex fallback	Intl.Segmenter (zh-CN only) with optional Jieba runtime
Vim mode support	No	Yes
Custom word lists	No	Yes (requires Jieba)

Installation

From the Obsidian Community Plugins browser:

1. Open Settings → Community plugins and disable Safe Mode if prompted.
2. Click Browse and search for Bamboo.
3. Click Install, then Enable.

Manual installation:

1. Download main.js and manifest.json from the latest release.
2. Copy them into your vault at .obsidian/plugins/bamboo/.
3. Reload Obsidian and enable the plugin under Settings → Community plugins.

How It Works

Bamboo uses the browser's built-in Intl.Segmenter API to find natural word boundaries in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean text. When that API is not available, a fallback rule-based segmenter kicks in automatically.

The plugin automatically detects whether the text around your cursor is CJK and steps aside for regular Latin text, so it never changes how you work with English, code, or anything else.

Supported Languages

• Chinese (Traditional & Simplified)
• Japanese (Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji)
• Korean (Hangul)

License

Bamboo is licensed under the MIT license.

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This plugin was built entirely with GitHub Copilot, powered by Claude Sonnet 4.6 and GPT-5.3-Codex.