In LN 015, we explored the concept of cross-reference navigation: a way to browse your things by the common connections found among the items stored in your personal computing graph.
I’ve assembled an early demo of this concept that you can use as a plugin for Obsidian.
It works on the notes in an Obsidian vault, using tags as the method of organization. It surfaces commonly cross-referenced tags as you browse through your things, and it makes great use of nested tags (e.g. #status/inprogress
).
Here’s how it works:
Watch this demo of the plugin, which lets you navigate your notes in Obsidian by your most common tags and cross-references (YouTube)
With the tag structure I use in my personal notes vault, this plugin effectively gives me a handful of useful interfaces. Some examples:
And of course, I can dive deeper from there: I might pull up just the things I’m reading in the topic of music, or specifically the things I’m currently writing on personal computing, or the things I’d like to read next by Doug Engelbart.
If you want to try out this plugin, be aware: It is early, so I’d recommend using it with a sample vault, such as the one I’ve published. It may be slow in vaults with many notes and tags, and there will be bugs!
Here’s how to try it out:
.obsidian/plugins
directory.If you want to use it with a sample vault, I’ve published the one from the demo video, and it already has the plugin installed.
I’ve published the full source on GitHub.
Something spark a thought? Email me, or come chat on Bluesky, on Mastodon, or on Twitter.