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.