Your vault, in three dimensions, without leaving Obsidian

• They read the same folder. An Obsidian vault is a folder of Markdown files and so is a Filamental space, so one folder can be both at once.
• They read the same wikilinks. The [[links]] already in your notes are read by both, and neither rewrites them.
• They don’t conflict. Both can be open on that folder at the same time, and neither takes it off the other.
• Importing is optional, and offered at the start. Point Filamental at a vault and it offers Import from Obsidian, which turns those wikilinks into real connections you can type and direct, and keeps the fields your notes already have. Opening it as it is takes in only the notes that have no front matter yet.

Open it from the ribbon and the graph starts simulating, so notes settle into the shape of your vault rather than the shape of your folders, and clicking one opens the note. What follows is the whole plugin, which is deliberately not very much.

• It reads what is already there. Your wikilinks, and the connections written in the front matter where a vault holds a Filamental space.
• Positions stick. Drag a node somewhere deliberate and it is still there on Friday, saved into the vault and shared with the desktop app.
• Colour comes from your categories. Notes carrying Filamental entity types keep their category colour.
• A panel and a button. The sidebar shows the active note’s type and what it connects to, and one button opens the folder in Filamental.
• Free, and desktop only. No account, no trial, no node limit.

Obsidian is open on a second screen here most days, and we use it as the place knowledge goes once it has been worked out. For that job it’s excellent and none of this is aimed at it. Filamental is for the half of the work that hasn’t settled yet and eventually has to be understood by somebody who wasn’t there.

That one folder runs in both directions, which is the useful part. A vault opens in Filamental when you want to see the shape of it, and a space that has reached the end of its useful life drops into a vault, where it goes back to being notes with its structure still in the front matter.

We did it this way because it is what we wanted for our own work. Anything kept on somebody else’s server is kept on somebody else’s terms, and those terms tend to get rewritten in the direction of whoever wrote them. Let us be the paranoid ones, and you can get on with the writing.

Every connection in the quick view is a plain line, because a line is all a quick view can honestly show. It can’t tell you that one note supersedes another, or blocks it, or reports to it, which is precisely what a connection carries in the desktop app.

• Connections that mean something. A type you name yourself, a direction and a strength, so supersedes, blocks and evidenced by stop being one grey line.
• Categories and properties. A Person, a Decision and a Contract get their own colour and shape, with the structured facts held on the node rather than buried in prose.
• Attachments. A file sits on the thing it concerns and opens in whatever normally opens it.
• Publisher. Send a space to somebody who has never heard of either application.

You keep writing in Obsidian, which is very good at writing, and the structure work happens next door in the same folder.

If you want a vault to become a Filamental space rather than only be viewed as one, there’s a one-time import that matches each [[wikilink]] to the note it points at and turns it into a real connection, reporting the ones that point nowhere rather than dropping them. Typing those connections is the work, and they arrive untyped on purpose, since the import knows two notes are related and can’t know whether one supersedes the other.

That first pass is the only time a wikilink becomes a connection. After it, a link you type stays a hyperlink you can click, because a link you made while writing a sentence is a different claim from a relationship you meant to assert. Opening a plain folder takes its links in the same way, and what it writes is on the plain Markdown page.

• The plugin. In Obsidian, open Settings, then Community plugins, then Browse, and search for 3D Filamental Graph, which is the name it’s listed under, so searching for Filamental alone may not surface it. Install it, enable it, click the icon in the ribbon.
• The application. Download it free for Windows, macOS or Linux, point it at the same folder, and carry on. Nothing to migrate, and the layout you arranged in the plugin is already there.

The plugin costs nothing and always will, with no account, no trial, no node limit and no feature switched off until you pay, because there’s no paid version of it to sell you.

• Personal, free and permanent. No account and no card. Spaces are unlimited, the bridges joining them are free, and each space holds twenty nodes, so a vault becomes several linked spaces rather than one enormous one.
• Fifteen days with everything unlocked on first install, so the paid features are something you have used rather than a description. When it ends nothing is deleted and nothing is held hostage.
• Professional, $120 a year or $12 a month. It buys one thing, sending a structure to somebody who doesn’t have Filamental, and most Obsidian users never need it.