Beautiful Graph

approved

by Dawson Bodenhamer

A cinematic, GPU-rendered knowledge graph with groups, folder lenses, search, focus, and live controls. - This plugin has not been manually reviewed by Obsidian staff.

★ 1 stars↓ 64 downloadsUpdated 12d agoMIT
Install in ObsidianView on GitHub

Beautiful Graph

See the structure in your knowledge.

A cinematic graph view for Obsidian, designed around folder-driven and Karpathy-style knowledge bases.

Release Obsidian License: MIT

Folder-aware indexes · Directory Groups · Curated palettes · Living ambience

Beautiful Graph forming folder families at startup

Beautiful Graph keeps graph navigation familiar and concentrates on what the native view does not provide: folder semantics, readable index.md hubs, visual Groups, expressive palettes, Folder Lens contours, and a deeply adjustable atmosphere.

Help keep it beautiful

Pretty graphs do not buy groceries. Yet.

If Beautiful Graph earns a permanent tab in your vault, a star helps people find it, thoughtful feedback helps make it better, and a few dollars can help fund the next round of polish—and possibly next week's groceries.

Star Beautiful Graph on GitHub Open a Beautiful Graph issue

Support Dawson Bodenhamer on Ko-fi Support Dawson Bodenhamer on Patreon

Built for Karpathy-style knowledge bases

Andrej Karpathy's LLM Wiki pattern uses an LLM-maintained Markdown wiki between raw sources and the person exploring them. index.md files become important navigation hubs as the wiki grows.

That structure is exactly what Beautiful Graph is designed to reveal.

  • An index.md node is labeled from its directory hierarchy instead of appearing as another indistinguishable index.
  • Repeated indexes remain readable across nested knowledge areas.
  • Top-level directories can become color-coded Groups automatically.
  • Beautiful Default reserves stable semantic colors and icons for dev, outputs, raw, and wiki.
  • The vault root, Group indexes, ordinary notes, and uncategorized notes each retain a distinct visual role.

The result is a graph where the shape of the wiki is visible—not merely the links between files.

A complete Karpathy-style vault in Beautiful Graph

Shown on a 2,411-note vault with folder hubs and semantic Groups.

What Beautiful Graph adds

FeatureWhat it changes
Folder-aware index labelsTurns repeated index.md files into recognizable directory and hierarchy labels.
Directory GroupsColors, icons, visibility, automatic analysis, per-row reset, and reusable presets for folder families.
Folder LensDraws soft contours around the notes belonging to a selected directory.
Curated palettesRecolors the complete Group system without rebuilding it by hand.
Index presentationGives root and Group indexes distinct scale, glow, icon, label, and linked-family treatment.
AmbienceAdds a controllable vignette, color treatment, and two-layer depth-aware dust field.
On-canvas studio controlsKeeps Groups, Forces, Display, and Ambience available as movable, pinnable panels with presets and undo/redo.

See whole folders at once

Select a Group name and Folder Lens traces every connected region belonging to that directory—even when the graph has arranged those notes into separate islands.

Folder Lens highlighting the Outputs group
Outputs		Folder Lens highlighting the Wiki group
Wiki

Hover into a neighborhood

Hover a node to bring its immediate family forward while the rest of the vault falls softly out of focus. Large index hubs and compact directory families remain readable without losing their place in the whole graph.

A large index family highlighted on hover
A large index family		A compact directory family highlighted on hover
A compact directory family

Make the vault yours

Beautiful Graph includes six coordinated palettes. Colors remain editable after applying a palette, and any Group can be reset to its assigned palette color independently.

Beautiful Default palette
Beautiful Default		Tokyo Night Moon palette
Tokyo Night Moon
Nord Aurora palette
Nord Aurora		High Discrimination palette
High Discrimination
Catppuccin Mocha palette
Catppuccin Mocha		Gruvbox Dark palette
Gruvbox Dark

Tune it without leaving the graph

Every Beautiful Graph-specific visual system is controlled directly on the canvas:

  • Groups: visibility, colors, icons, Folder Lens, palette selection, automatic analysis, and presets.
  • Ambience: vignette, brightness, hue, saturation, particle speed, count, irregularity, size, fade, and boost.
  • Display: label threshold, node and link scale, glow, sibling links, orphans, and focused-family centering.
  • Forces: a compact four-control panel for shaping the layout when you want a different visual composition.

Panels can be pinned, collapsed, moved, resized, reset, and saved as presets. The bottom toolbar provides filter, undo, redo, and recenter controls without opening a settings page.

Beautiful Graph with all four live control panels open

Install

Community plugins

  1. Open Settings → Community plugins → Browse.
  2. Search for Beautiful Graph.
  3. Select Install, then Enable.

BRAT

To install a beta build before it reaches Community plugins:

  1. Install and enable BRAT.
  2. Choose Add Beta plugin.
  3. Enter DawsonBodenhamer/beautiful-graph.

Manual installation

Download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the matching GitHub release, then place them in:

<your-vault>/.obsidian/plugins/beautiful-graph/

Restart Obsidian and enable Beautiful Graph under Settings → Community plugins.

Beautiful Graph is desktop-only and requires Obsidian 1.8.0 or newer.

Start with your folder structure

  1. Open the command palette and run Beautiful Graph: Open graph, or select the orbit icon in the ribbon.
  2. Expand Groups and select Analyze & Auto Group to discover the vault's top-level directories.
  3. Choose a palette or assign individual colors and icons.
  4. Select a Group name to toggle its Folder Lens.
  5. Adjust Ambience and Display until the graph fits the vault's visual identity.
  6. Save the result as presets if you want to experiment without losing it.

Beautiful Graph enumerates Markdown files and link metadata to construct the vault graph. Filtering can read note text and frontmatter into an in-memory search index for the current graph view. That search index is discarded when the view closes.

Beautiful Graph never edits note contents or sends vault paths, metadata, or note text over the network. Its settings, optional cooled position seeds, and local troubleshooting log stay in the plugin's Obsidian data directory.

Build from source

Requires Node.js 22+, npm, Rust 1.88.0, and the wasm32-unknown-unknown target.

npm ci
npm test
npm run build
cargo test --locked --workspace

The production build creates the three files used by Obsidian Community plugins: main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css.

Contributing

Found a defect or have an idea? Open a GitHub issue with your Obsidian version, Beautiful Graph version, operating system, and reproduction steps.

Focused pull requests are welcome. Run the test and build commands before submitting changes. Generated runtime artifacts should not be committed.

Current limitations

  • Desktop only.
  • A minimap is not currently included.
  • File Explorer selection integration may need maintenance after major Obsidian interface changes.
  • Very large vaults remain dependent on device capability and active visual settings.

Built for wandering through ideas without losing the shape of them.

Releases · Issues · MIT License

For plugin developers

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