Visual Maps & Vault Insight

Ariv offers several visual tools that help you understand the shape of your knowledge base at a glance. From interactive graph visualizations to activity heatmaps, these features turn raw data into actionable insight — revealing patterns, gaps, and connections that are invisible when you’re looking at notes one at a time.

Visual Maps

Visual Maps renders your vault as an interactive graph. Each node is a note, each edge is a link between notes. The result is a bird’s-eye view of your entire knowledge base and how its pieces connect.

What you see

• Nodes represent individual notes. Their size or prominence may reflect how many connections they have.
• Edges represent wiki-links ([[note name]]) between notes. If Note A links to Note B, a line connects them.
• Clusters of densely connected notes form naturally, showing you which topics are well-developed and which are isolated.

Interacting with the graph

• Click a node to open that note in the editor.
• Zoom and pan to explore different areas of your vault.
• Hover over a node to highlight its connections.

Tip

If you notice a cluster of notes that aren’t connected to anything else, consider adding a few links to integrate them with the rest of your vault. Isolated clusters are often a sign of ideas that could benefit from cross-pollination.

Getting the most out of Visual Maps

Visual Maps is most useful when your vault has a healthy number of internal links. The more you use [[wiki-links]] in your notes, the richer and more informative the graph becomes. If your graph looks sparse, start by adding links between related notes — the backlinks feature makes it easy to see where connections are missing.

Vault Insight

Vault Insight is a statistics dashboard that gives you a quantitative overview of your vault. It answers the question: “What does my knowledge base actually look like?”

Available statistics

Metric	Description
Total note count	How many notes are in your vault
Tag distribution	A breakdown of your most-used tags, showing which topics dominate
Activity patterns	When you tend to create and edit notes
Lifecycle breakdown	How many notes are Active, in the Inbox, or in the Background

The lifecycle breakdown is particularly useful for vault health checks. A large inbox might mean you’re capturing faster than you’re processing. A small active set might mean you’re not revisiting old ideas enough.

Note

All statistics are computed from your local SQLite database. Nothing is sent externally — this is purely a local analysis of your vault’s metadata.

Activity Map

The Activity Map is a visual heatmap showing your writing activity over time, similar to a GitHub contribution graph. Each cell represents a day, and the intensity of color reflects how much you wrote or edited that day.

Why it’s useful

• Build writing habits. Seeing a streak of active days is motivating. Seeing gaps helps you identify when your note-taking dropped off.
• Spot patterns. You might discover that you’re most productive on certain days of the week, or that your activity spikes around specific events.
• Track consistency. For writers, researchers, or anyone trying to maintain a regular note-taking practice, the activity map provides gentle accountability.

Tip

Don’t aim for a perfect streak. The Activity Map is an observation tool, not a guilt machine. Even a few days per week of consistent note-taking builds a valuable knowledge base over time.

Timeline

The Timeline provides a chronological view of your notes, sorted by date. This is useful when you want to:

• Retrace your thinking. Scroll through your notes in the order you created or modified them to reconstruct a train of thought.
• Find notes from a specific period. If you remember roughly when you wrote something but not what you called it, the timeline helps you narrow it down.
• Review recent work. See everything you’ve captured over the past week or month in one scrollable view.

Quick overview

Feature	What it shows	Best for
Visual Maps	Interactive graph of note connections	Understanding vault structure
Vault Insight	Statistics and metrics	Quantitative health checks
Activity Map	Writing activity heatmap	Habit tracking and consistency
Timeline	Chronological note list	Retracing your thinking

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Related: Backlinks — The links that power Visual Maps | Dashboard — Your daily command center with lifecycle overview