Galaxy View

Galaxy View

A cinematic 3D graph view for Obsidian — fly through your vault like NASA's Eyes on Asteroids.

Your notes become a galaxy: luminous nodes colored by your graph groups, thin desaturated link filaments, a slowly rotating starfield, and a camera that glides instead of jumps. Beauty and playfulness are part of productivity.

中文文档见 README.zh.md。

Highlights

• Fast on real vaults — 3,000+ notes / 20,000+ links render at 60 fps in under 10 draw calls. The force simulation runs in a Web Worker: zero main-thread jank, even during layout.
• Cinematic camera — click a note to fly to it (the camera arrives off-axis and immediately starts orbiting, sweeping across the side where its neighbors cluster), idle cruise with organic drift, a reveal animation that blooms the galaxy out of the center on open.
• Playable physics — repulsion, link distance/strength, center pull, and a flatten force that turns the cloud into a spiral-galaxy disc. Drag a slider and watch the universe rearrange in real time.
• Curved links & deep-space backdrop — links can arc away from the galactic core (slider, 0 = straight); the backdrop splits into four stackable layers: star shell, nebula veil (baked once, tinted by your color theme), drifting field stars (parallax), and cluster mist (colored clouds hugging dense clusters). All woven into the presets, each layer customizable.
• Style & color presets — eight hand-drawn bundles (Galaxy, Spiral, Orbits, Deep Field, Nebula, Minimal, Fireworks, Supernova) that differ across backdrop layers, palette, node size, physics, bloom, and link curvature; hover to preview live, click to apply. Save your own presets (reorder / delete), plus color themes (Hubble deep field, neon, sunset film, cyberpunk, Matrix, aurora) or import the color groups from your core 2D graph.
• Guided navigation — Wander, a hands-off cinematic auto-tour that drifts between your notable and long-unseen notes, and Connect two, which flies the shortest link path between any two notes.
• Focus mode — selecting a note dims everything but its neighborhood (optionally out to the 2nd degree), highlights its links at full saturation, and shows a draggable, collapsible card with backlinks, tags, and a snippet.
• Markdown and Canvas in one graph — .md notes and .canvas boards both participate in the vault graph; Canvas files keep graph navigation and file actions without pretending their JSON is note prose.
• Tag Lens, colors & bounded hubs — tags stay off by default. Enable their own section to focus the graph from the top-12 chips, optionally color notes by primary tag, or add only the top 5–50 tag hubs. Each layer persists independently; no tag work runs while the master switch is off.
• Six-language UI — English / 中文 / Deutsch / Italiano / Español / Português, auto-detecting your Obsidian language and switchable in the panel.
• Filter by clicking, not by typing — the Filter section lists your top-level folders with their node color and note count: click one to hide it, hover for only. It's the legend the graph never had and the filter at the same time. A collapsed text field handles what a legend can't express — cross-cutting name patterns like -file:Index.
• Search & navigate — fuzzy search flies you to any note; WASD/Q/E free flight; right-drag or ⌘-drag to pan; F/R/ESC shortcuts.
• Mobile aware — automatic quality tier on phones (no postprocessing, top-1500 nodes by degree, bottom-sheet cards) keeps it smooth on iOS and Android.
• Two visual directions — always-dark deep space, or theme-adaptive with a designed ink-on-paper light mode.

Install

From the community plugin store: search for "Galaxy view".

Via BRAT: add Longwind1984/galaxy-view in the BRAT plugin.

Manual: download main.js, manifest.json, styles.css from the latest release into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/galaxy-view/, then enable it in Settings → Community plugins.

Usage

Click the orbit icon in the ribbon, or run the command "Open galaxy view". The control panel (top-left) contains quick actions and presets, then separate Filter and Tags sections, collapsible appearance / deep-space / bloom / physics controls, a navigation zone (auto-orbit, Wander, Connect two), and advanced options. Hover any slider and double-click to reset it; everything persists.

Filter

The Filter section lists every top-level folder with the color its notes carry in the graph and how many there are:

• Click a folder to hide it — its notes and their links leave the graph.
• Hover → "only" to isolate one folder; click again to restore.
• Show all (in the section header) brings everything back.
• The unresolved and orphan toggles live here too — they answer the same question: which notes enter the graph.

Colors match the graph exactly, including groups imported from your core 2D graph, while folder coloring is active. If Tag colors is enabled, the graph deliberately switches to primary-tag colors; the folder swatches remain as stable folder identities for filtering.

By name (collapsed, under the folder list) covers what a folder list can't — patterns that cut across folders:

Matching is case-insensitive and substring-based. Note contents are not searched — the filter reads only paths and filenames, which is what keeps it instant on large vaults.

Tags

Tags are a separate exploration layer, not another text filter. Turn Show tags on to read the existing Obsidian tag metadata and reveal the top 12 chips ranked by note count; an active tag that later falls below the cutoff stays appended until cleared. Selecting a chip activates one Tag Lens, keeping matching notes and their relevant links bright; selecting it again clears the Lens. An ordinary node selection temporarily takes precedence, and clearing that selection restores the Lens.

• Tag colors colors each tagged note by its first tag. The color is derived from the tag name, so adding or reranking tags does not recolor existing ones; untagged notes keep their normal folder/imported color.
• Tag hubs adds only the most-used tag nodes and their note links. The slider is hard-bounded to 5–50; hubs are off by default and create no hidden layout nodes or forces while disabled.
• Reset tags clears the Lens and restores tag colors, hubs, and the hub limit without touching filters, presets, or navigation.

All three features reuse the same metadata read performed by Show tags. There is no second tag extraction path, and the hub name deliberately avoids collision with Galaxy View's deep-space nebula layer.

File support

Markdown notes use Obsidian's resolved link index. Obsidian 1.13.1 does not expose equivalent metadata for Canvas, so Galaxy View reads each Canvas JSON once at startup and treats its file cards as links from the Canvas board to those vault files. Later Canvas edits are debounced and reread only for the changed board, with the last valid parse retained during partial writes. Markdown-only metadata such as tags and snippets is never requested from a Canvas file, so Canvas cards keep date, graph statistics, open, and focus actions without displaying raw JSON as a note excerpt.

Privacy

No network requests, no telemetry. The plugin reads your vault's link graph and (optionally, read-only) the core graph's color groups from .obsidian/graph.json.

License

MIT