Obsidian (optional)

Obsidian is optional and never required. A Vivary workspace is plain Markdown + YAML — it works in any editor, or none. This page is for people who like Obsidian and want a nice visual home for the graph. Nothing in Vivary depends on it.

The editor-free visual graph: tropo view

The precise, typed knowledge graph — the real edges, coloured by type — renders to a single self-contained HTML file, no editor or plugin needed:

tropo view --root . --out graph.html   # or: uvx --from vivary-tropo tropo view ...
# open graph.html in any browser

That is the canonical Vivary graph visual. Use it anywhere.

If you love Obsidian

Initialize Vivary first, then open the workspace folder as a vault. Thin init does not write .obsidian/ or advertise an editor flag; editor configuration is user-owned and separate from the governed-context contract.

Two things worth knowing:

1. Keep editor state separate. Let Obsidian create its own config, then decide which UI files belong in version control. Vivary will not copy or overwrite them.

2. Edges in Obsidian’s graph. Obsidian’s native graph draws [[wikilinks]] and tags. Vivary’s edges live in typed frontmatter (related_modules: [codebase]) so tropo can validate them — Obsidian won’t draw those as graph lines out of the box. To navigate them in-app, install the community Dataview plugin; for the true typed-graph picture, use tropo view (above). Node colouring by type works either way.

The principle

Recommend Obsidian to fans, never require it. The same workspace must work for someone on plain vim + a terminal, in Claude Code, or in Codex: the lightweight CLIs operate over plain files without a provider or network service, and governed Tropo composes only the first-party vivary-core seam. The visual graph (tropo view) needs nothing but a browser.