🌐 The Graph View — a built-in plugin

In short:

Graph view is a visual map of all your notes. It shows the links between files and helps you see how your vault is structured. It’s especially useful when you want to step out of linear thinking and look at your knowledge “from above”.

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🔧 How to enable it

1. Go to Settings → Core plugins → Graph
2. Click the graph icon in the left sidebar
   1. Or call it via the command palette CTRL + P
   2. Choose the Graph function

I also recommend assigning a hotkey — for me it’s ALT + 3, for example

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📈 What’s shown

• Nodes — these are your notes
• Lines — these are the internal links [[...]]
• Colours/sizes — configurable (more on them below)

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⚙️ Global graph settings

• Filters — exclude folders or tags (-Daily, #draft)

  • By file name
    • Daily — shows only files with this word in the title
    • -Daily — excludes them
  • By folders
    • -Templates/ — exclude the whole Templates folder
    • Notes/ — keep only notes from this folder
  • By tags
    • #literature — show only files with this tag
    • -#draft — hide drafts

• Groups — you can colour notes by tags, folders, words

What we group by	Example value
By tag	#philosophy
By folder	Notes/Projects/
By word in the title	MOC
By property (Dataview)	type:: article

• Attraction/Repulsion — the density and spread of nodes
• Link Types — account for/ignore mentions (![[...]])
• Display — hide orphan nodes, enable directions, arrows

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📄 The local graph

Each note can have its own graph — via the icon in the top-right corner.

It shows:

• Only the connected notes
• You can set the link depth (1–2 levels further)
• Useful for focusing on a topic

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🔍 Practice and cases

• MOC notes — handy to see what it’s connected to
• Checking for notes with no links — if there’s no link, it’s easy to find and integrate
• Visualising Zettelkasten — you can clearly see how the knowledge network grows
• Visual control — where there’s chaos and where there’s structure

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💡 Tips

• Use Groups: for example, colour #📖 literature one colour, #📈 finances another
• Hide Daily Notes if they get in the way — via Filters
• Create custom CSS: you can customise the look of the nodes

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📎 Combos with plugins

• Juggl — an alternative 3D graph
• Breadcrumbs — adds hierarchy
• Graph Analysis — analyses node importance (centrality, density)

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🧩 Downsides

• Not for everyone — it can be overload
• It doesn’t always help with search — more for visual understanding
• With a lot of notes — it can lag

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📝 Summary

Graph view isn’t just a pretty feature. It’s a tool for meta-analysis, navigation and building a system. But if you’re just starting out — don’t get bogged down. Come back to it later, when you have something to connect.

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Keep going?

• 🧠 Random notes
• ⬅️ Back to home