Vault Orrery

Vault Orrery

See your Obsidian vault as a living star system — and replay how it grew. Folders are stars, notes are the planets orbiting them, and every body on screen is a note you can be reading a second later. Keep a small one turning in your sidebar while you write, and share yours as a photo card. Works offline.

The demo is the same engine the plugin is built from. It opens on a sample vault; drop a folder of markdown on it and it draws yours instead. The folder is read in the browser and the page makes no network requests of any kind.

What makes it different

1 · Genesis replays your vault's history. Press G and the cosmos rewinds to empty space, then condenses forward to today, note by note, in the order you actually wrote them. It is not an animation of the finished graph — it is the vault's own history, and you can scrub it.

2 · Folders are star systems, not another colour of dot. Each folder is a lit system with its notes in orbit round its star, so the shape of the vault is the shape of the picture: a crowded folder looks crowded, and an orphaned note sits out on its own.

3 · It is wired into the editor. Click a planet and its note is in the inspector — properties, tags, an excerpt, every link and backlink — with the buttons to open it, map it or trace a route from it right under its name. Ctrl/Cmd-click opens the note beside the orrery, the note you are editing carries its own beacon, and Show in Vault Orrery is on every note's context menu.

4 · It stays open beside your work. A mini orrery lives in the right sidebar: the whole vault, turning slowly about the note you are editing, with a ring of light on that note. Click a planet to open it. It draws twenty frames a second with no panels and no sound, and stops while the sidebar is closed — and the full view drops to thirty frames a second whenever you leave it alone, so neither one is something you have to remember to close.

5 · It makes something worth posting. Press C for a 9:16 photo card: your vault's own sky in the frame, its name above, and up to six numbers below — how old the vault is, how many notes and links, its biggest system, its most cited note, its longest streak, a constellation name of its own. Turn and zoom inside the frame, then save a 1080 × 1920 image or record fifteen seconds of whatever you do with the camera as an MP4.

Getting started

1. Install — Settings → Community plugins → Browse → Vault Orrery.
2. Open it — the orbit icon in the ribbon, or Vault Orrery: Open in the command palette. A card names the four moves that are enough to get going. The mini orrery is already in your right sidebar.
3. Explore — drag to orbit, scroll to zoom, click a planet to read it, double-click for its mind map, and press G to watch the vault form.

If a large vault feels slow, press FAST at the top of the controls (⚙ on the rail). The first time a big vault opens on a machine that is struggling, the orrery does that for you and says so.

What it does

The tools sit on a thin rail at the left edge and open as drawers, so the frame is all sky until you ask for one: ⌕ search, ◎ the vault's numbers, ✦ star systems, ⚙ controls, ? shortcuts, ◌ Genesis and ● the photo card. PIN keeps a drawer open beside the next; a click on the sky closes the rest. The inspector appears when you select a note.

• Mini orrery — the same cosmos in the right sidebar, centred on the note you are editing. Open the mini orrery in the sidebar brings it back.
• Photo card — C — a 9:16 image or a fifteen-second MP4 of your vault, with the stats you choose.
• Mind map — M or double-click — one note's neighbourhood, two hops out, in place, with a reading rail beside it.
• Search — / — notes, controls and actions in one box. Front-matter properties are searchable, so status: blocked is a thing you can look for.
• Route — pick two notes and the shortest way between them lights up.
• Broken links, counted in the status panel and named in the inspector. Click the count to keep only the notes carrying them.
• Ripple — SPACE — a wave along the links from the selected note.
• Poster — P — a high-resolution PNG of the whole frame with no HUD.
• Quality presets — CINEMA · BALANCED · FAST — the eight light effects in one click, and every knob still there under ADVANCED.
• The sky has events. A comet lands on the note you just touched; a note deleted while you watch goes out as a supernova and says its name.
• Ambient sound — U — every note has a pitch; off until you ask.
• 한국어 · English · 日本語 · 中文, switchable without reloading.

The graph is Obsidian's own. Links, backlinks and tags come from the index Obsidian already keeps, so a link written through an alias resolves rather than counting as broken, an embed counts as a link, and a #tag in a paragraph counts alongside the ones in the front matter.

The vault stays current. Notes written, created, renamed or deleted while the view is open re-derive the cosmos — camera and selection left where they were, and no loading curtain over a view you are using.

Controls

The first time a vault loads, a card names the four moves that are enough to get going. Any key dismisses it. ? — or the [ ? ] in the title bar of the SHORTCUTS drawer — opens the full guide, which explains each of the above and the three things that have no key: the broken-link filter, the route, and BRIDGE. The four-move card is one click away at the bottom of it. Escape closes an open drawer before anything else.

Privacy, in one paragraph

No network access at runtime. At all. No server, no telemetry, no analytics, no update check, no remote font, no CDN — the plugin makes zero outbound requests. The shipped main.js has no fetch, XMLHttpRequest, WebSocket or atob in it at all, and npm run check fails the build if one ever appears. It reads every markdown file in the vault, because the shape of the vault is what is being drawn and a graph of a subset is a different vault's picture. Reading goes through Obsidian's own cache, and your excluded-files patterns are applied first, so a note you have hidden is never opened at all.

→ The long version, and how to verify it

Large vaults

If a big vault runs slowly, press FAST at the head of the controls drawer: it turns the bloom, the lens, the halo and the sky's light off in one go, and CINEMA puts them back. The first time a vault of 600 notes or more opens, the orrery watches the frame rate for a few seconds and switches to FAST on its own if the machine is plainly struggling — once, and with a line saying so.

The MAX NODES ceiling ships off: a cap that silently drops half a vault is worse than a slow first minute, and the slider is right there. Rendering stops entirely when you are not looking at the view, so an orrery in a background tab costs nothing; a view on screen that nobody has touched for twenty seconds draws at half rate, and the sidebar's mini orrery always draws at a third.

→ Performance in detail

Installation

From the community plugin browser: Settings → Community plugins → Browse → "Vault Orrery" → Install.

Manually: copy main.js, manifest.json and styles.css from the release into <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/vault-orrery/, then enable it in Settings. Those three files are the whole plugin — the parts of three.js it uses are bundled into main.js, so nothing is fetched at runtime.

Desktop only: the renderer needs WebGL.

Going deeper

• How the picture is made — the grade, the glow, and the two knobs that decide how tightly the cosmos is packed.
• The astronomy is not decoration — what is actually simulated, and what is deliberately not to scale.
• The hub, and hearing the vault — how the central star is chosen, and what the sound is playing.
• Privacy and excluded files
• Performance on large vaults
• Development — the engine is a single openable HTML page; this is how it becomes the plugin.
• Contributing
• Changelog

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

This plugin bundles three.js (MIT) and nothing else, and does not fetch it from a network at runtime. Full notice and licence text in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.