See how your vault connects: the graph and cleanup tools
I’ve never fully trusted graph views. The first time you open one, it’s fascinating — look, my notes are a network! Give it a few months of real use, though, and most of them turn into the same thing: a ball of string you eventually stop looking at. I wanted Plainva’s version to actually earn its place next to the editor, not just look good in a screenshot, so it had to do more than draw circles and lines.
Three graphs, one habit worth keeping
Right beside the note you’re writing sits a small context graph: what links here, what it links to, and a few gentle suggestions for connections you might have missed — nothing you have to go hunting for. Press Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+G and you get the vault map, a zoomable picture of everything, organised by your actual folders so it can’t collapse into that hairball I was trying to avoid. You can drag nodes around, lasso a cluster to move it together, Alt-drag one to bring its neighbours along, and pin an arrangement you like so it’s still there next time. There’s a focus mode, filters, and a slider that lets you watch how the vault grew over time — oddly satisfying on an old vault. And if you use .base databases, a view can render its rows as a graph too, a network of relations instead of a table.
The part I actually use
Truthfully, the graph isn’t my favourite bit — cleanup mode is. It hands you a plain work list: notes nothing links to, links pointing at files that don’t exist, mentions of a note’s title that never became a link. Each item comes with an action, and Plainva rechecks that it’s still true right before it touches a single file.
None of the suggestions behind any of this come from a model I’d have to ask you to trust blindly — co-citation, shared neighbours, rare shared tags, plain-text matches, all boring on purpose. You can see exactly why something was suggested, and wave it off just as easily.
- More: the graph guide
- Try it: plainva.com
— Marco