Graph View

Let me spread out every note in your vault like stars scattered across a vast universe! The more links a note has, the more popular it is — and the brighter it shines. ✨

← Back home: ObsiKO 101

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Launching into orbit 🚀

• Click the Graph View button in the sidebar header, right next to the search and command palette buttons (over by the Dashboard button). You can also open it straight away with ⌘⇧G.
• Graph View opens in a fresh tab. Close the tab when you're done exploring to land right back on your document.

▲ Notes are stars, links are constellations! The more links a note has, the brighter its star.

What's out there in your universe? 🌌

• Stars = notes, and the thin lines connecting stars = links (just like a constellation!).
• Mind maps (.canvas) show up as stars too — connected by lines to any note that a file card inside the canvas points to.
• Lines that come from AI chat transcripts are faint and dashed — a [[link]] written in a chat transcript (_ObsiKO/chats/) isn't a link between your notes but a "mentioned in a conversation," so it's drawn faint and dashed to tell it apart. If the same two notes are also linked directly, the line is a normal one. → Personal Memory
• Leave the graph open while you create or edit notes, and your universe updates itself automatically (thanks to vault watching). Notes that have already been scanned are cached, so even huge vaults load fast.
• Stars with more incoming links shine brighter and bigger (a little ObsiKO magic — randomness — goes into the size too). On the space background, stars are drawn as points of light — they stay small even when you zoom in, with a soft colored glow spreading around a crisp white core, just like a real night sky. Lines stop just short of each star, so they look like constellations.
• On the space background, stars come in six colors like real stars (blue, white, yellow, orange…). Turn the space background off and they take their tint from your current theme's highlight color.
• Watch it for a moment and the whole thing slowly turns around its center like a spiral galaxy (one turn every 4–5 minutes). All the stars turn together, so linked stars never drift apart; when you first open it, it spreads out a little (up to 1.4× its starting size) and then settles. It stops while you drag a star or move the view and for 2–3 seconds after, and slows down while you hover over a star. Perfect for zoning out!
• Notes and small clusters that aren't connected to anything turn a little more slowly in a belt just outside the galaxy — they never drift off the screen.
• 📱 On mobile (iPhone, iPad, and Android), we go easy on your battery and heat: in vaults with a great many notes (from about 400), the rotation stops and the view holds still once everything has settled. Dragging stars and zooming still work, and it only turns briefly when notes change and it has to settle again (with fewer notes, it keeps turning on mobile too). Desktop and the browser version always turn, no matter how many notes you have.

Move the stars around 💫

• Click a star and a small, softly-glowing info card pops up right there — showing the note's name and link count, with an [Open] button to jump to it.
• Double-click a star to skip the card and zip straight to that note.
• Hover over a star and only its directly connected neighbors stay sharp while everything else dims slightly, giving you an instant read on who this note is close to. This highlight isn't a hard on/off flip — it's a gentle fade in and out, easy on the eyes (the same goes for click and search highlights).
• Grab a star with your mouse and drag it. It accelerates smoothly, and when you let go it drifts gently through space for a moment. Any linked neighbor stars tag along too — really charming to watch!
• Labels appear as you zoom in — pull in a little and the most-connected stars get their names first; zoom in about twice as far and they all show. The star you hover over or click, its neighbors, and stars matched by search show their names at any zoom. When labels overlap, the less important ones hide, and labels that come to overlap while the galaxy turns fade instead of switching off, so nothing flickers.
• Hit Fit to view and the camera glides over to fit this whole vast universe onto one screen. Touch the screen mid-flight and it stops right there.
• Reopen it and it's where you left it: the star layout is remembered per vault (on this device, for your 6 most recent vaults), so it keeps the same shape when you open it again. New notes are placed near their neighbor stars. A vault opened for the first time starts at a zoom that shows everything, and if you were viewing a note, it opens near that star.

Find a star fast — search 🔎

• Type part of a name into the search box in the top right (shortcut /). Matching stars stay bright while the rest dim. Press Enter and the camera flies to the star whose name matches best.
• Initial-consonant search works too — typing just ㅎㄱ will find your 한글 note.

Centered on what you were reading — active marker & local graph 🎯

• The star for the note you were editing right before opening the graph gets a ring marker, so you instantly know "that's where I am."
• Flip on the Local Graph toggle in the toolbar to keep only the notes within two hops of the note you were viewing (or the star you clicked), for a narrow, focused look. Especially handy in large vaults!
• Notes with no links at all — orphans — show up desaturated. Spot a faded star and you'll instantly think, "I should link this one to something." 🧩

Viewing modes to match your taste (next to the Fit-to-View button!) 🔭

• History View: watch your stars 'born' one by one in chronological order, starting from the very moment you first created each note.
• Space Background (dark mode): swap the background for a pitch-black cosmic gradient with twinkling starlight. It's on from the start — if you'd rather have a light background, just flip this button off, and it stays off.
  • Turning it on also darkens the controls — buttons, the search box, the relation chips — so nothing glares at you even if you're on a light theme.
  • Up to three notes you just created or edited (within the last 10 minutes) flare like a nova once when it opens, then shine a little brighter for about a minute. Every so often (once every 3–6 minutes) a shooting star goes by.
  • From far away only the big constellation lines stand out; the closer you zoom in, the more of the small lines come to life.
  • With your device's 'Reduce Motion' on, the camera jumps instead of flying, and the twinkling rings are skipped.

Typed edges that glow with relationship colors 🔗

• Write typed relationships like is-a, part-of, or causes in a note's frontmatter, and the lines connecting those stars will glow with predicate-specific colors and directional arrows!
• Relation chips: when the vault has typed relations, chips appear at the bottom-left of the graph. Toggle a chip off to temporarily hide just that relation's lines and keep only the web you care about (the layout stays put). Register a color: in the relation dictionary and the line colors follow it! → 16-5 Zettelkasten & Ontology
• is-a in blue · part-of in green · causes in red · opposes in magenta … zoom in or hover and the relationship name floats up over the line too.
• If you're not sure what a color means, hit the help ('?') button in the top left to check the legend. → For more details: Structuring Knowledge

PARA notes shine differently 🗄️✨

Notes you've tagged with a para property via PARA stand out in the universe like nothing else.

• Their colors invert so they pop, and projects (project) gently shimmer — that feeling of "this is a live, moving task right now!"
• Areas (area) grow bigger and emit rings of light the more attached projects and links they carry, showing off their "influence".
• Projects cluster near their own area (parent_area) — drag an area and its projects follow elastically. Hierarchy properties like parent cluster into families the same way.

A theme that's a perfect match 🎨

• Try setting your color preset to Cosmic Star in Settings. It pairs stunningly well with this whole space concept! → Go change your theme: Settings & Themes

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