Graph Heatmap

An Obsidian plugin that colors graph view nodes by a metric you choose — recency, connectedness, word count, file size — and lets you focus on subsets of the vault (orphans, hubs, stale notes, stubs). All controls live in a floating panel inside the graph view, so you can switch metric, palette, scale, and filter without leaving the graph.

Features

Metrics

Color nodes by any of:

• Last modified (mtime) — newest hottest
• Created (ctime) — newest hottest
• Total connections (backlinks + outgoing) — most connected hottest
• Backlinks — most-referenced hottest
• Outgoing links — most-linking hottest
• Word count — longest hottest (lazy-loaded, cached per file)
• File size — largest hottest

Focus Mode

Hide or dim parts of the graph to isolate what matters:

• Top 10% / 25% by current metric — your hubs / hot notes
• Bottom 10% / 25% by current metric — the cold tail
• Only orphans (0 links) — unlinked notes
• Only stale (oldest 10%) — dust collectors
• Only stubs (shortest 10%) — incomplete drafts
• Hide orphans — clean the graph of noise

Hidden nodes fade to 12% opacity by default; turn on Hide completely in settings for fully invisible nodes and edges.

Recent-edit halo

Notes modified within the last 24 hours (configurable) get their color blended toward a halo color (default cyan). Always on, regardless of which metric you're coloring by — so you can always see what you just touched.

12 built-in color palettes

Heat, Inferno, Viridis, Plasma, Magma, Sunset, Forest, Ocean, Grayscale, GitHub, Cool fire, Cyber — plus a Custom mode with three color pickers.

Scale modes

• Relative (default) — rank nodes by value across the whole vault. Every color is always used regardless of how active your vault is.
• Absolute (time metrics only) — map age to days directly, with a configurable span.

Hover tooltip

Hover any node to see its path, the current metric's raw value, when it was last modified, how many connections it has, and its rank in the vault.

Floating control panel

Bottom-left of the graph view, collapsible. Switch metric / scale / palette / Focus Mode without opening Settings. Shows a live gradient swatch with metric-aware labels ("newest ←→ oldest", "most ←→ least").

Installation

Via BRAT (recommended until this plugin is in the official community list)

1. Install the BRAT plugin.
2. In BRAT: Add Beta plugin → paste mafgin/obsidian-graph-heatmap → Add.
3. Enable Graph Heatmap in Settings → Community plugins.

Manual

1. Download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest release.
2. Drop them into <your-vault>/.obsidian/plugins/graph-heatmap/.
3. Enable in Settings → Community plugins.

Usage

Open the graph view. The control panel appears in the bottom-left:

• On — toggle the heatmap.
• Metric — what drives the color.
• Scale — relative (rank) or absolute (days; time metrics only).
• Colors — pick a palette or Custom.
• Focus — show only a subset (orphans, hubs, stale, etc.).

Advanced options live in Settings → Graph Heatmap: custom color pickers, span (days), log scale, halo color / window, dim vs hide for Focus Mode, and tooltip toggle.

Recommended combos

• Metric: Last modified + Focus: Only orphans + Colors: Inferno — your unlinked notes, colored by how stale they are. Cleanup list.
• Metric: Total connections + Colors: Viridis — hub map. Pure structural view.
• Metric: Word count + Focus: Only stubs + Colors: GitHub — your shortest notes, easy to spot for expansion or deletion.
• Metric: Last modified + halo on — see this week's activity at a glance.

How it works

The plugin hooks Obsidian's layout-change, active-leaf-change, and vault.modify events, plus a 2-second tick, and writes per-node colors via renderer.nodes[].color. For each open graph view it:

1. Computes a "value" per node for the chosen metric (higher = hotter for everything: newer time, more links, more words, more bytes).
2. Either ranks values (relative) or maps time delta to 0–1 (absolute).
3. Interpolates the active 3-stop gradient at that fraction.
4. Blends toward the halo color if mtime is within the halo window.
5. Applies the Focus Mode filter — sets alpha=0 (or 0.12) on nodes and edges that don't match.
6. Writes the result into the PIXI renderer.

The plugin uses undocumented Obsidian internals for per-node color (the same pattern as other graph plugins like Extended Graph). If the renderer's shape changes in a future Obsidian release, the plugin degrades silently — colors stop updating until the patch is adjusted, but nothing breaks.

Building

npm install
npm run build       # production bundle to main.js
npm run dev         # esbuild watch mode

License

MIT — see LICENSE.