wiki-canvas

wiki-canvas

When This Skill Activates

User wants a visual map of their vault structure.
User asks to see how pages are connected.
After significant ingestion or restructuring, user wants an updated overview.
User mentions Obsidian Canvas or visual vault exploration.

Pre-orientation reads

Standard four reads (SCHEMA, index, log, project context if applicable).

Steps

Resolve vault: skillwiki path.
Run skillwiki graph build <vault> to produce the adjacency graph at <vault>/.skillwiki/graph.json. If graph.json already exists and the vault has not changed, this step can be skipped — but regenerate after any ingestion, reingest, archive, or restructuring to keep the canvas current.
Run skillwiki canvas generate <vault>. This reads graph.json and writes <vault>/vault-graph.canvas.
Present the result to the user: node count, edge count, and the output path.
Advise the user on opening the canvas:
- In Obsidian, open the vault folder and click vault-graph.canvas in the file explorer, or use the Quick Switcher (Cmd/Ctrl+O) and search for "vault-graph".
- Nodes are arranged in columns by type: entities (red), concepts (green), comparisons (orange), queries (cyan), meta (purple). Unclassified pages appear in yellow in the comparisons column.
- Edges represent wikilink connections. Click any node to jump to the source page; drag to rearrange.
- Zoom and pan with mouse/trackpad to explore large vaults.
Append one log.md entry noting the canvas generation (node/edge counts).

When to regenerate

Regenerate the canvas after any of these events:

One or more wiki-ingest runs that added new pages.
wiki-reingest or wiki-archive that changed or removed pages.
Manual restructuring of the vault directories.
After running wiki-lint and fixing structural issues.

Stale canvases are not harmful, but they will not reflect new or removed pages until regenerated.

Future: Bases view

Obsidian Bases (.base files) offer tabular data views of vault content. A Bases generation capability may be added in a future version to complement the graph canvas with filterable, sortable table layouts. For now, the canvas is the primary visualization.

Stop conditions

skillwiki graph build returns a non-zero exit code — investigate before continuing.
graph.json is missing or invalid — the canvas command will surface the error; direct the user to run skillwiki graph build first.
User cancels before generation.

Forbidden

Modifying vault-graph.canvas by hand after generation — regenerate it instead.
Regenating the canvas without first regenerating graph.json when the vault has changed.
Deleting the previous canvas without generating a replacement.