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 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 browserThat is the canonical Vivary graph visual. Use it anywhere.
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:
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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.
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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, usetropo view(above). Node colouring by type works either way.
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.