Rhizone Graph

Two ways to see the same vault — built on the idea that a vault links notes to facets, not to other notes, and that a single map would freeze the territory. So this plugin gives you two complementary, deliberately partial views instead of one authoritative graph:

• Reticular Graph — the resident. A local, per-note connection-web (a CRT targeting scope): what the note you're on connects to, and what it could connect to, so you forge links by hand. The worn paths. This ships today.
• Rhizone — the tourist in your own vault. A whole-vault facet view whose job is estrangement: the adjacencies you'd never draw yourself — notes joined only by a single rare, happenstance facet. Planned (design in .claude/docs/); not built yet.

The engine (read this — future-you will forget it)

This vault links notes to facets, not to other notes. Most [[wikilinks]] point at genres, people, franchises, and projects ([[Science Fiction]], [[Philip K. Dick]], [[Vlad]]) — often to notes that don't even exist. That's a faceted tag system in wikilink syntax.

So the engine is co-citation over shared facets: two notes are related when they cite the same facets — even phantom (uncreated) ones. Candidates are ranked rarity beats count: the rarest shared facet wins (lowest document-frequency), with Σ 1/df as the tiebreak. Sharing [[Philip K. Dick]] (rare) means far more than sharing [[Religion]] (common). No embeddings, no network — pure structure, so it stays light.

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Reticular Graph — the local connection-web (shipping)

Open it on a note and it shows, as a CRT targeting scope, that note's neighborhood — and you traverse it. It is not a global graph; it shows one note at a time.

Three layers, three states

State	Source	In the scope
Connected ●	the connections: frontmatter property	inner ring, solid
Mentioned ○	an inline [[link]] only	inner ring, dim/dashed
Candidate ◇	co-citation only (no link yet)	outer ring, accent, pulsing
Dangling ⚠	a connection whose target note is gone	flagged, never auto-pruned

connections: is the curated note↔note web. It's grown by hand — forging a candidate writes the link into both notes' frontmatter (bidirectional, idempotent, always via processFrontMatter).

The Scope

Concentric range-rings around a ⊕ reticle. Inner ring = DIRECT (links + connections), outer = CO-CITATION candidates, placed rarest-first from 12 o'clock, clockwise (best candidate due north). Hover/focus a contact to see why it's there (its shared facets, rarest-first).

Keyboard: Tab cycle contacts · Enter traverse · F designate (forge) · Esc back.

Appearance follows your theme accent by default; the Style Settings panel adds a phosphor override (amber/green) and sweep/scanline intensity sliders. Honors prefers-reduced-motion.

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Rhizone — the facet view (planned)

The inverse of Reticular. Where Reticular shows the resident's worn paths, Rhizone makes you a tourist: it surfaces only the connections you'd never draw — strangers joined by a single rare facet. Sketch of the design (full spec in .claude/docs/):

• Perspectival, never canonical — renders from a vantage and re-lays-out on every jump. Many maps, one per entry; no stored master map.
• Global rarity as gravity — a rare shared facet pulls hard, dragging two strangers together; common facets exert almost no pull.
• Altitude = rarity — rare facets sit high, common facets sink to the floor (the Etz Chaim's emanation axis: Kether → Malkuth).
• Default look: the Ten Gateways — the whole vault compressed to ten Sephirot; side pillars = the two largest co-occurrence communities, middle pillar = the rare bridges between them.
• Doors & stairs — every note a door; every jump a rare-facet stair. Forging a connection graduates a pair into Reticular — so the tourist view depletes as you colonize it.

Non-goals

• Reticular is never a whole-vault graph (that's Rhizone's job).
• No embeddings, ML, or network calls.
• No auto-population of connections — it is curated; the plugin only writes it on an explicit forge.
• No file rewrites for matching — the Concept - prefix alias-strip is internal only.

Build & install

npm install
npm run build          # tsc -noEmit + esbuild -> main.js
npm test               # node --test (engine golden + idempotency gates)

Install by symlinking this folder into your vault: <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/rhizone-graph -> this repo, then enable Rhizone Graph in Community Plugins. Open any note and run “Open in Reticular Graph” (command, ribbon, or the file-menu).

Architecture

• src/engine/ — pure, zero Obsidian imports (inverted index, co-citation, rarity ranking, alias-strip, ring layout). Unit-tested with Node's built-in runner.
• src/obsidian/ — thin adapter: metadataCache → records, and all connections writes via processFrontMatter.
• src/view/ — the SVG Scope, traversal/keyboard, preview, dangling remediation.

MIT · Sonophage.