GRAPH WALLPAPER
Turns an Obsidian vault into a live, force-directed desktop wallpaper that redraws as notes and links change, with the same colors and physics as the real graph view.
An always-current map of the vault on the desktop, driven by Lively Wallpaper.
// problem
The graph view is the best picture of a knowledge base, but it only exists inside an open app window.
// limitations
- No server. Local files only.
- Must survive reboots and crashes unattended.
// infrastructure used
- A generator walks the vault, resolves every [[wikilink]], and reads .obsidian/graph.json for colors and forces.
- A file watcher re-runs the generator a few seconds after edits stop.
- The wallpaper page polls the generated data and fades new nodes in without a reload.
- A restart loop relaunches the watcher if it ever crashes.
// lessons learned
- 01The graph never stopped drifting.
Every data poll restarted the physics simulation. It now only reheats when nodes or links actually change.
- 02Browsers block loading local files.
A page opened from disk cannot fetch a JSON file, so the generator writes the graph as a script the page loads instead.
- 03Obsidian's settings didn't fit a screen nobody touches.
Near-zero repel works when you pan by hand, but on a wallpaper the nodes clumped. A fixed charge and a collision force spread them out.
- 04A locked log file crashed the watcher.
Logging is now wrapped so it can't take the process down, and a loop restarts the watcher a few seconds after any exit.
- 05Updates never reached the screen.
Lively had copied the wallpaper into its own library, so the regenerated data landed in the wrong folder. The generator now writes to both copies.