The graph is where your notes stop being a list and start being a landscape. Open it with ⌘G, or from View ▸ Graph View. Press ⌘G again to switch to the timeline; to leave, press Esc or click the ✕ at the right end of the toolbar. The sidebar folds away while you're in the graph (⌘S still shows it) and comes back the way you had it when you leave.
See the connections
Every note is a point and every tag a yellow pentagon; lines connect your notes to one another through your [[links]], and tie each note to its tags. Nodes lays them out with a force-directed simulation, so related notes drift together and the structure of your thinking arranges itself.
It's a live view, not a static map - give it a nudge and it settles into shape.
Explore
- Pan and zoom to move through your library. Drag the empty canvas to pan, and scroll or pinch to zoom. Double-click empty space to fit the whole graph back in view.
- Clusters form naturally around topics you've connected - a quick way to spot a body of work you didn't realize you'd built.
- Loose notes with few links stand out, too. They're often the ones worth linking up next.
Click a note or tag to select it: it turns red, its neighborhood lights up, and a bar at the bottom lists what it connects to - a note's tags and its incoming and outgoing links, or the notes that use a tag. Click one of those to move the selection there. To open what you've selected, click it again or use the bar's Open Node (Open Tag for a tag) - the graph closes and the note, or the tag's page, opens.
Open the graph's settings from the toolbar (the slider button) to tune the layout forces, search for a note or tag (⌘F jumps straight to the search field), or Simulate over time - play the scrubber to watch your notes appear in the order you created them.
Besides the forces, Text fade, Node size and Link width change how the canvas draws, and the arrow at the top of the panel puts every slider back to its default. While the panel is open, Space plays and pauses the scrubber (except while you're typing a search), and the speed button steps through 1×, 2× and 4×.
The more you link your notes, the more the graph has to show you. A handful of notes looks sparse; a well-linked library starts to look like a map of how you think.
For a different cut of the same library - by time instead of connection - try the timeline.