This reminded me of a feature request “Trails in the graph-view!” opened a few months ago, which describes a similar idea. It is accompanied by an amusing cartoon that does a great job of depicting the idea!
To pull a short quote from the proposal:
The idea is to show suggested paths through your knowledge base. That is, map a structure-zettel (SZ) to the graph-view using a trail! This way you can see how each note relates to other notes as well as following a suggested path. May be even have more than one SZ mapped this way. The reason for the latter is also that different people learn differently so one can fashion each SZ accordingly.
@rictomm “note paths” and @juen “path through the garden” - I love these phrases. They do a great job of extending the digital garden idea, as does the idea of a “trail” from @scmwiz.
To take that a little further and without delving too far into the metaphor, perhaps a “trail” could include (highlight) dead-end nodes that branch off from it’s primary direction, whereas a “path” would not do this. A path would show a clear, definite direction to take.
Why?
Because a trail is potentially a less defined than a path. I’m imagining the difference between wandering across the countryside from a campsite to a nearby hilltop, and walking through a manicured country manor house garden.
In practical Obsidian terms, I think it could be useful to be able to use the graph view itself to click on and select a set of nodes and save them as a “path” or “trail”. Though that differentiation isn’t important when saving, just a single option to save the highlighted nodes as “something” . Whatever “Obsidian term” best encompasses these concepts would be enough.