Galaxy Graph

An Obsidian plugin that renders your entire vault as a navigable 3D force-directed graph. Explore your second brain like a galaxy: orbit, zoom, pan, click nodes to inspect them, and double-click to fly the camera toward any note.

Demo

Exploring a vault: orbiting, clicking nodes, inspecting connections:

Vault Timeline: replaying your vault's history, notes appearing in the order they were created:

Requirements

• Obsidian 1.4 or later (desktop only)
• Node 18+ and npm (for building)

Installation

Manual install (not yet on the Community Plugins store):

1. Clone this repo somewhere outside your vault, then build it:

   git clone https://github.com/<your-fork>/galaxy-graph.git
   cd galaxy-graph
   npm install
   npm run build

2. Copy main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css into a new folder in your vault:

   mkdir -p "<YourVault>/.obsidian/plugins/galaxy-graph"
   cp main.js manifest.json styles.css "<YourVault>/.obsidian/plugins/galaxy-graph/"

3. In Obsidian: Settings → Community Plugins → toggle Galaxy Graph on.

Developing

npm run dev   # watches main.ts/src and rebuilds main.js on every save

After each rebuild, copy main.js into your vault's plugin folder again and reload it: Settings → Community Plugins → disable Galaxy Graph → re-enable it (or reload the whole app with Cmd+R).

To skip the manual copy step during development, symlink the build output straight into your vault instead of copying it:

ln -sf "$(pwd)/main.js" "<YourVault>/.obsidian/plugins/galaxy-graph/main.js"

Usage

• Click the network icon in the left ribbon, or run the command Open Galaxy Graph via the command palette (Cmd/Ctrl+P).
• Orbit: left-drag
• Pan: right-drag (or two-finger drag on trackpad)
• Zoom: scroll wheel / pinch
• Single-click a node: highlights its direct connections and opens the inspector panel on the right
• Double-click a node: camera flies toward it
• Reset View button: returns to full-galaxy view and clears highlights
• Background click: clears the current selection

Inspector panel

Shows for the selected note:

• Title (coloured by folder)
• Out / In / Total connection counts
• First ~200 chars of note body (frontmatter stripped)
• "Open Note →" button: opens the file in a new tab
• "Links to" list: notes this note wikilinks to (clickable, navigates selection)
• "Linked from" list: notes that wikilink to this note

Clicking a hub note also shows its cluster growth over time and a scrollable local neighborhood list:

Node size scales with total connections (degree). Hub notes are larger and visually brighter when highlighted, and color can be mapped by folder, tag, index status, or note activity depending on your settings.

Performance note

The plugin warns if your vault exceeds 2 000 notes. It still renders, it just may be slower on older hardware. All graph state is in memory; nothing is written to disk.

Credits

The logo at the top of this README was generated with ChatGPT's image generation feature.