Spellcheck Fix

A tiny Obsidian plugin that wakes up the spellchecker. In big vaults it can get stuck.

The problem

On Linux (Electron/Chromium), Obsidian's spellchecker frequently does nothing: no red squiggles under misspelled words, even though everything looks correctly configured. A common "fix" people discover is to open Settings → Editor → Spellcheck languages, remove a language and add it back — after which it works, but only until the next restart.

The reason: at startup Chromium restores the spellchecker state from its profile (the languages are there, the dictionaries are downloaded, the checker reports as enabled), but the checker never actually attaches to the window until session.setSpellCheckerLanguages() is called again. Obsidian trusts the persisted state and never re-applies it, so spell-check stays dormant. Manually re-selecting the languages is exactly what calls that method — hence "works until restart".

What this plugin does

Once the workspace is ready, it re-applies the spellchecker languages, which re-attaches the dormant checker. That's the whole trick.

Re-applying the same language list is a no-op, so it would not wake anything — the call has to be a real change:

• With two or more languages, it reverses their order. That's a genuine change, so a single call re-attaches the checker instantly with no delay. (Which language is "primary" barely matters for a mixed setup, and the order simply flips on each launch.)
• With a single language, reversing changes nothing, so it briefly clears the list and restores it ~200 ms later — the clear-then-restore is the real change that wakes the checker.

Other details:

• It reads the languages you chose in Obsidian's settings — nothing is hard-coded (there's only a ["en-US", "ru"] fallback if the session reports none).
• A command, "Spellcheck Fix: Re-apply spellchecker languages now", lets you re-run it manually from the command palette (Ctrl/Cmd-P) if needed.

[!note] Chromium only checks text as you edit it. Already-rendered text is not re-checked retroactively, so to confirm it works, start typing rather than staring at existing text.

Installation (manual)

1. Create a folder spellcheck-fix inside your vault's .obsidian/plugins/ directory.
2. Copy main.js and manifest.json into it.
3. In Obsidian: Settings → Community plugins, refresh the list, and enable Spellcheck Fix.

Notes

• Desktop only (the bug and the fix are specific to the Electron spellchecker).
• Primarily aimed at Linux; harmless elsewhere.