I’ve been ignoring Obsidian’s graphical representation for years, and I’ve been looking at the wrong graph.

Obsidian’s graphics are probably the most satisfying part of the app. If you have hundreds or thousands of records, opening it up gives you a really cool looking network of interconnected dots, all clickable. This graphical representation also seems to be a key part of the second brain setup, and it can make any marking folder look much cleaner than it is. But getting something out of it is a different story—most people stick around for a while before closing the tab.

That was me too until I realized I was trying to use the wrong graph view. This is a global graphical view, and there is another type called a local graphical view. We won’t go into how long it took to figure this out (because that’s just embarrassing), but if you’re trying to figure out how a graphical representation can be useful, you’re probably looking at a bug, too.

What Obsidian’s Global Graphic Shows You

Well-known graphics are not everything

A global graph is what most people refer to as a graph view. This is a basic plugin that automatically maps every record in your repository, with each circle standing for a record and lines drawn between any two connecting them. Circles grow larger as more notes are added to them. There is a button on the ribbon for this, or you can use the Ctrl + G key combination.

Hovering over a dot will show you what’s added to it before you jump to the record. There’s very little in the options panel (filters, color groups, display options, plus forces to control how tightly everything is clustered), and there’s a time-lapse animation that puts your notes in the order they were created.

Now it’s not useless, it gives you the big picture. But it’s easy to lose interest, especially if you have a large warehouse with many nodes and connections; it then becomes a digital hairball. It shows me how two posts connect without telling me why or how they relate to what I’m working on. I don’t think any vault with 10k+ files is very impractical to navigate this way.

Where has the local graph been hiding all this time?

And he does it differently

I think the reason the native graph doesn’t get as much buzz is because you have to go looking for it, so many users probably don’t even know it’s there. There’s no button for it on the ribbon, and while the global chart gets Ctrl + G, there’s no local shortcut at all. You need to open the command palette (Ctrl + P), type “graph” and select it Graphic View: Open a local graph. It’s also tucked away in the three-dot menu at the top of every post, which I never bothered to check.

Once you select it, it will open in a split view next to any file you have open. While the global chart shows your entire storage, the local chart shows only the records added to the currently opened record on the other side of the split view. My first post came up with seven connections – I knew they were there, but seeing it visually puts it into perspective.

It has almost all the same settings as the global graph, plus a depth slider. At depth 1, you’ll only see direct links, and each level above will pull posts related to the ones already shown. Also, there are only three switches here. Inbound and outbound links do what they say, and turning off adjacent links hides the lines between surrounding posts so you only see links from your current post. I recommend playing around with these switches until you find a look that makes sense for your workflow.

Why is a local graph good?

It helped me dig through my stash

After I saved my native graph in the view, it made me see links that I had previously ignored. For example, a local graph of my heuristics post produced a draft about productivity workflows and a daily post from July that I linked to once and forgot about. I don’t think I could find any of them in the global graph.

Now I also check the local graph before I post a new post, so instead of repeating myself, I link to something that already exists. This is where directional switches come in handy. Disabling incoming links leaves only the note-based. This is handy, for example, to determine which posts will go into a specific article idea before I start describing it. If I want to see what rests on the note instead, it works the other way around.

There are some rough edges. Hub entries break it down – my 1-deep regional index is essentially a mini-global graph because it links almost everything in the repository. If you push deeper than 2, you’ll be back in the hairline area very quickly.

I looked at the wrong graph

I still occasionally open a global graph in my stash. But since I know it exists, the local graph is used more. I like that it’s right next to whatever I’m writing or reading at that moment, and I wish Obsidian would give it its own panel button. If you’ve only used the tape version, try the local version on your oldest post, then your newest post, and it might help you find connections you never noticed.

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