Filter outgoing link visibility in Graph View

I would like to use graph to show and link notes within various sets. As in, I would like to be able to have the ability to ostensibly switch between various sets of links within a vault’s notes.

Although I am not married to this exact approach, I think it clarifies the idea. You could have the graph view only show the links that are within a header name that is a link with a certain symbol in its name.

So for example, you could have a note named “Special Group”. And you could have a bunch of notes that contain a header name with a link to Special Group.

And when you would want to begin filtering the graph, and perhaps also the notes in preview mode, to just show connections and content that is within the Special Group header, you could just open the Special Group Note and add a unique symbol or sequence of characters at the beginning of the note name. This could either apply to all sub headers or not depending on a toggle in settings.

Of course, there could be more powerful and user friendly implementations that could piggyback on tags or allow for more surgical selections of regions of notes to specify, perhaps allowing for overlapping of multiple sets within notes. But with my approach, I am trying to take cues from what I have learned from Markdown and the way Obsidian operates.

By having a pane dedicated to showing a real-time search of notes with that special trigger symbol/symbols, you could easily toggle out of this mode by removing those symbols.

I realize this may be more in the plugin arena, but feel this could be core to sidestepping the multiple vault conundrum, so feature seems like my best guess.

Simultaneously opening multiple copied versions of the same vaults is one option.

When searching, I found Toggle Links but that differs in that it focuses on hiding links inside note that may have a distracting number of links within.

Thanks for your patience. I apologize for getting so detailed when I am sure the idea could have been explained much more succinctly. Typing request from a phone ironically tends to do this to me. It probably has something to do with not being able to take an overview as I am typing. Too bad I use this forum exclusively from my phone, but that may change with this realization.

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(There’s some kind of glitch in your post, I think—the bulleted items appear blank to me.)

I would think you can accomplish this sort of thing already by using - operators, as in -“Special Header” to filter out all notes in the graph with the words “Special Header”? I do like the idea of filtering in/out notes linking to certain notes though.

Thanks, I was trying to remove the feature request prompts but add some sort of separation between answers to the questions.

Anyways. I was unclear. My goal is not to filter the notes, but rather the links. The idea in my proposed solution would be to have headers that were links themselves to a note. That note, if it had a special trigger word/symbol, would tell the graph to only show outgoing links contained within that header for that note. This would also apply to other notes with that header.

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Thanks for writing this request! I had a similar idea with a possibly more modular implementation:

I would also like to be able to filter links in the graph view, but I’d prefer to manually assign each link’s “Toggle Group” within the links themselves. That way there is no ambiguity.

Examples:

In a note titled “Jane Smith” you could write [[John Smith::Family Relationships]]

In a note titled “April 7 2021” you could write [[April 8 2021::Daily Note Chain]] and [[April 2021 MOC::Monthly Note Groups]]

^ Here I’m proposing “::” as a special separator to assign togglable link groups, similar to how “|” allows you to change the display text for a link. You could use any reserved separator though.

Then in the graph view:

You could turn “Family Relationships” off, and Jane Smith would no longer be visually linked to John Smith.

You could turn “Daily Note Chain” on and “Monthly Note Groups” off to view your notes as a chain, where each note connects to the next day.

Alternatively, you could turn “Daily Note Chain” off and “Monthly Note Groups” on to view them as clusters of daily notes, connected only to the Map of Content for their month.

Rationale:

Not all relationships are the same. So we should be able to identify, store, and visualize types of relationships, not only that two notes are related “somehow.”

I think this functionality would be massive for personal knowledge management, because it would enable users to heavily link their notes without the threat of mass visual clutter. It also allows us to create multiple ways of organizing / visualizing the relationships between ideas and distinguishing different levels and different types of connections.

I would use this feature literally every day.

Final note:

Apologies if my feature concept is too different from your original suggestion. This comment may deserve to be its own feature request, but I figured I’d post it here first to see what you think.

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Thanks so much!

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Circling back around to this. I’m working on a separate feature request for the “modular link group” functionality I described. I made a proof of concept, which I’m attaching here, mostly to make sure I know how to upload gifs correctly :sunglasses:

“MOC Cluster” Link Group Example:

Toggle Link Groups POC_1

“Family Members” Link Group Example:

Toggle Link Groups POC_2

“Interests” Link Group Example:

Toggle Link Groups POC_3

Multiple Link Groups Example:

Multiple Toggle Groups

My post will be up soon. Hopefully we’ll get the devs onboard!

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The post is up!

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