myBrain

myBrain for Obsidian

✅ New in 1.0.38

Hover highlighting for connected links and neighboring nodes

When hovering a link or node, the graph now highlights:

the hovered element, directly connected links, neighboring nodes. This makes relationship tracing much faster and improves readability in dense graphs.

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"Structure is liberation. Your notes belong to you, and your graph should think the way you do."

Unlike standard chaotic force-directed link graphs, myBrain is a highly structured semantic graph view built for speed, clarity and large vaults. It layouts your notes using a predictable, clean layout matrix relative to your active focused note.

All node partitions, column expansions, and connections are built inside a 100% Hardware-Accelerated CSS Grid. Bypasses text-parsing chains and heavy canvas layers via an O(1) Just-In-Time (JIT) memory mesh.

Typical display

In a crowded environment

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📦 Installation

Option 1: Community Plugins (recommended)

• Search for myBrain in Obsidian's Community Plugins.
• Click Install and then Enable.

Option 2: BRAT (beta/testing)

• Install the BRAT plugin from Community Plugins.
• Go to BRAT settings -> Add Beta Plugin.
• Paste this repository URL: https://github.com/CarlB01/myBrain

Option 3: Manual installation

• Download the latest release (main.js, manifest.json, styles.css).
• Create a folder named mybrain inside your vault under .obsidian/plugins/.
• Move the downloaded files into that folder and restart Obsidian.

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🚀 Quick Start Guide

Get up and running with myBrain in less than 2 minutes. The plugin works automatically with your existing links, but you can unlock its full power using note properties (frontmatter).

1. The 5-Minute Layout Map

myBrain automatically organizes your vault relative to your active note based on how you link them:

• Parents: Add links to your parent notes in the frontmatter properties.
• Friends: Lateral peer connections. Note: Unlike ExcaliBrain, notes do not become friends just by linking to each other. Instead, it is enough that just one of the notes explicitly defines the other as a friend in its properties.
• Siblings: Notes that share the exact same parent note. Note: You do not define siblings manually; myBrain calculates and computes them automatically based on shared parents.
• Children: Standard forward links present inside your body text, or explicitly defined child properties.

💡 Smart Link Direction: You don't need to worry about link directionality for hierarchies. Whether a parent links down to a child, or a child links up to a parent, myBrain automatically resolves the relationship and routes them into the correct semantic quadrants.

2. Configure Your Note Properties (Optional)

To tell myBrain explicitly how notes are related, add these keys to your note's properties (YAML frontmatter):

---
parents: [[My Parent Note]]
children: [[My Child Note]]
friends: [[My Friend Note]]
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(You can customize these property names under Settings → myBrain if you prefer using up, down, peer, etc.).

3. Open the View

You can open the semantic graph view in two ways:

• Method 1 (Fastest): Click the ✨ (Sparkle) icon in your Obsidian left ribbon/toolbar.
• Method 2: Open the command palette (Ctrl+P or Cmd+P), type myBrain: Open semantic graph view, and press Enter.

Tip: Drag and drop the opened myBrain tab anywhere you like in your workspace sidebar or main layout!

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🎨 Conceptual Layout Matrix

           PARENTS
             │  \
             │   ---┐
             ▼      ▼
FRIENDS ◄► CENTER   SIBLINGS
             │
             ▼
           CHILDREN 

Architectural Mapping Matrix

How undefined nodes are handled

• Links from the center note that are not explicitly defined as children are treated as undefined and automatically gathered at the bottom of the lower area.
• In the Siblings group, undefined siblings are sorted last.

Collapse groups

When a quadrant contains many nodes of the same type, they can optionally be collapsed with a +/- button to keep the view clean and readable.

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⚡ Technical Core & Architecture

Unlike standard chaotic force-directed link graphs, myBrain gives you local orientation. Native-style hover previews — peek at note content on hover, consistent with Obsidian's own page preview behavior.

Flexible workspace placement

The myBrain graph is a normal Obsidian view. Drag its tab and drop it anywhere in the workspace—left or right sidebar, main editor area, or a separate window.

Native-style hover previews

— peek at note content on hover, consistent with Obsidian’s own page preview behavior.

📐 CSS-first visual engine (now pane-adaptive)

myBrain is built on a CSS-first rendering architecture: quadrants, column flow, spacing, wrapping, and most interaction styling are handled by native, hardware-accelerated CSS.

• Now fully pane-adaptive: The graph dynamically adapts to the exact workspace container it lives in (sidebar, main pane, or detached window).
• Lightweight runtime assist: A small TypeScript layer only handles what CSS cannot do alone reliably across all contexts—runtime container measurement, adaptive height caps, redraw timing, and SVG path refresh.
• Zero Layout-Squeezing: Nodes are still generated in a protective off-screen render curtain (.is-calculating) to reduce visible reflow during render.

🚀 Fast JIT Cache Performance

• No Database Bottlenecks: Bypasses text-parsing chains and heavy queries during active navigation cycles using an advanced asynchronous Just-In-Time (JIT) memory mesh.
• Instantaneous Cross-Linking ("Baits"): Nodes dynamically cast multi-directional anchor tokens so that "everyone discovers everyone" across massive datasets instantly.

Excalibrain-like structure

If your existing structure is Excalibrain-friendly and front-matter based there would be little or no rewrites necessary.

Supercharged Links Ready

Respects your existing tag-based font colors, customized icons, and core appearance settings natively out of the box.

Dynamic Top-to-Bottom Column Wrapping

Unlike standard horizontal CSS flex layouts, myBrain utilizes CSS Multi-column layout containers inside its responsive areas.

• Design Intent: This enforces a strict top-to-bottom, left-to-right newspaper-style wrapping for clustered note groups, preserving structural hierarchy without hardcoding element heights.
• Obsidian Partial Support Mitigation: To fully shield the layout engine from edge-case Chromium reflow bugs during high-frequency tab swaps, the plugin encapsulates this layout using a protective off-screen render curtain (.is-calculating) combined with strict element containment rules (break-inside: avoid). This ensures flawless geometric coordinate tracking across both desktop and mobile viewports.

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🔒 Privacy & Data Safety

This plugin triggers an automated notice during the Obsidian community review process called Vault Enumeration (due to the use of vault.getMarkdownFiles()).

• 100% Local Processing: This function is strictly used to map note relationships natively and build your semantic graph in real-time.
• No External Transmission: No file paths, note titles, or contents are ever sent to external servers, trackers, or third-party APIs. Your data remains completely yours, offline, and inside your vault.

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📰 The Backstory & Legacy

For decades, the semantic power of mapping information into strict Parents, Children, Friends, and Siblings relationships belonged to closed, proprietary database silos. As a healthcare professional, I depended on this structured mode of thought every day.

When Licat and Silver launched Obsidian, it felt like home. When Zsolt introduced ExcaliBrain, it was a revelation. I even had the privilege of collaborating briefly with Zsolt to help adapt its behavior to real-world semantic workflows.

However, as the years passed, it became clear that a graph framework bolted onto a heavy vector drawing canvas (Excalidraw) introduced rigid limitations. It restricted downstream interface interactions and made dynamic scaling harder than necessary.

When Zsolt hinted at gatherings that it was time for a native implementation to take over, I accepted the challenge. I went back to the drawing board—mapping out how nodes could dynamically project into strict semantic quadrants without sacrificing speed.

myBrain is the result: a clean, uncompromising, lightning-fast native implementation designed to bring cognitive structure back to the user on their own terms.

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🔮 Roadmap & Future Horizons

• Colorize Lines & Gates: This update adds colorization for relationship lines and gate nodes, improving readability and direction-scanning in dense graphs.
• Interactive context popup menus to add parents/children on the fly.
• Multi-generation expansion toggles to view grandparents/grandchildren rows.
• Inline node image decoding when targeted hyperlink references represent image assets.
• Specialized handling of decrypted content blocks protected by Meld Encrypt (if possible).

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🤝 Acknowledgments

This plugin would not exist without the immense inspiration, code legacy studies, and cognitive frameworks pioneered by:

• Harlan and the creators of TheBrain for proving that structured association is a beautiful way to organize human knowledge.
• Zsolt Viczián for creating ExcaliBrain, for the short and motivating period of collaboration, and for inspiring the native renaissance of this structure.
• Licat and Silver for giving the world Obsidian, an extensible, local-first ecosystem where we can build anything.

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Developed with passion by a healthcare worker who loves graphs and believes semantic structure should belong to everyone. If you enjoy this work, consider starring the repository!