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

0. Resolve vault: skillwiki path.
1. 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.
2. Run skillwiki canvas generate <vault>. This reads graph.json and writes <vault>/vault-graph.canvas.
3. Present the result to the user: node count, edge count, and the output path.
4. 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.
5. 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.