Special Characters Panel

A searchable, categorized panel of special characters for Obsidian. Click a symbol to copy it and insert it at the cursor.

Features

• Sidebar panel with real-time search by character, name, HTML entity or Unicode code point (rarr, 2192, U+2192, right arrow)
• About 590 symbols in 8 categories: Arrows, Math Symbols, Currency, Bullets & Lists, Dingbats, Accented Latin, Greek Letters, Punctuation
• Click to copy and insert into the last note you were editing
• Favourites: right-click (or long-press on touch devices) a symbol to pin it
• Recently used row
• Follows your light/dark theme

Usage

Open the panel from the sigma ribbon icon or run Open Panel from the command palette. Close Panel is also available as a command.

Settings

• Symbol size (small / medium / large)
• Show or hide the category tabs, recently used row and symbol count
• Insert as character or HTML entity (for example →)
• Add a trailing space after the symbol
• Close the panel automatically after inserting

Adding your own symbols

Create custom-symbols.json in the plugin folder (<vault>/.obsidian/plugins/special-characters-panel/) and reload the plugin. Each entry is [character, name, optionalEntityName]:

{
  "My Symbols": [
    ["☕", "hot beverage"],
    ["→", "rightwards arrow", "rarr"]
  ]
}

Using an existing category name adds to that category.

Manual installation

Copy main.js, manifest.json and styles.css into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/special-characters-panel/, then enable the plugin in Settings → Community plugins.

Development

The symbol data lives in symbols.json and is embedded into main.js by a build step. After editing symbols.json, run:

node build.js

License

MIT