Plainva

Graph

Last reviewed: 2026-08-04

Plainva’s graph is a working tool, not a poster: it shows you where you are, what is connected, what is missing — and you can act on it directly. There is ONE graph engine with three faces.

Context graph (right sidebar)

Open the Graph section in the right sidebar. It shows the active note in the center, the folder structure above, for folder overviews (index.md) the contained notes below, incoming references on the left and outgoing ones on the right. Relations from databases carry their property name as the label.

Vault map (its own tab)

Open the map with Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+G, via the graph icon in the action rail on the far left, or via the command palette (Open graph). It opens in its own tab. Instead of a hairball you see your real folder structure as bubbles — double-click a bubble and the folder unfolds into a container circle that encloses its notes and subfolders; unfolded subfolders nest inside it like a map. Double-click the circle’s rim to fold the folder back up, Collapse all folders closes everything. The circle always follows its content: move notes inside and it grows with them; drag the rim and the folder moves together with its content. Inside a circle the notes still arrange by their links, and edges run directly from note to note. The layout is deterministic: the same map looks the same every time you open it. Pan the map with the middle mouse button or Ctrl/Cmd+drag, and zoom with the mouse wheel. Drag a node and it stays pinned (small dot). At the top right, the pin needle toggles remembering on and off: turn it off and this view’s remembered arrangement is discarded and the automatic layout returns (the same as Reset layout in the right-click menu). Pins are stored per device.

Tools in the header bar:

Working on the map:

Cleaning up

The Clean up button opens a worklist with three tabs: Orphans (notes without connections), Broken links (targets that do not exist — Create note creates them) and Mentions (Scan vault finds places where a note is named but not linked; Link turns the occurrence into a wiki link). The map’s footer shows the orphan count — clicking it opens the panel.

Graph as a database view

Every .base database can get a Graph view (add view → Graph): the database’s rows become nodes, your relations become labeled edges. In the header bar you pick the edge properties, Color by a select property, Size by a number and whether external targets (relations pointing out of the database) or incoming relations (relations from other databases that point at these entries — e.g. a project’s tasks) appear. The view is saved Obsidian-compatibly — Obsidian shows the same file as a table.

On the phone this view has the vault map’s handling: zoom buttons and a legend, long-pressing a node opens it or releases its pin, and an arrangement you drag into shape is remembered — under the same key as on the desktop, so one database and view keep ONE arrangement.

Limits