Obsidian's graph view is pretty chill for visualizing your collection of markdown files, and it's fun to edit your VimWiki in a terminal while having Obsidian open side-by-side so you can see the graph of markdowns change in real time.
For those wanting a FOSS Obsidian alternative though, Logseq is an obvious choice, but what if you want to skip graphical apps altogether and just work in the terminal alone?
I found this on r/commandline today and while it didn't work at all for me, it did point me to a script which did work.
For visualizing your wiki after running the script, you can follow wolandark's handy recommendation and use this site which is pretty awesome, or you can take his other suggestion which is to use graphvis to visualize your wiki.
I actually installed it with Homebrew (brew install graphviz -- note the z!) and it made a cool visualization similar to Obsidian's graph view (see the attached image, which was made with the circo command). The image is deliberately blurry for privacy's sake, but the image generated on my computer is fully zoomable and you can see every filename and also see how each file connects to one another.
So does this replace Obsidian/Logseq? No. Definitely not. For one, it's a static image. Secondly, constantly zooming in/out is annoying. And thirdly, as you can see from the attached image, the visualization can get pretty difficult to read, especially without coloring and the ability to move overlapping nodes around.
On the other hand, is this really cool and fun, though? Yes! And for smaller wikis, I could see the visualization being of greater use because it would definitely be more legible.
Is there a real use to a graph-like visualization like this? Or is it just for pure fun? I find backtrack lists or mentioned lists a lot more useful. When I used to use Logseq, the graph view would be quite slow when I had a hundred or so files. Nowadays, I just use orgmode for more temporary, short stuff and an actual hosted wiki for more permanent, long-written stuff.
For me, this was just pure fun lol. But then, so is the graph view in Obsidian/Logseq (at least when visualizing my wiki is concerned).
Can you explain what backtrack/mentioned lists are?
Yeah, Orgmode is awesome but these days I'm just using VimWiki. What do you mean by 'actual hosted wiki'?
Backtrack/mentioned lists show you a list of pages that mention the page you're on, so you can see how it's related to other pages.
It's hard to find one solution that fits all my use cases, I have to admit.
And by actual hosted wiki, I mean Dokuwiki, Wiki.js, Bookstack, Gollum, Mkdocs, etc. that renders the syntax into HTML.I like that they make my "notes" appear more immutable and allow me to access them through any browser. This applies to content like glossaries, food/drinks recipes, homelab documentation. Things you put in once and forget.
