ganten7/navi

Navi is a desktop graph viewer for org-roam, a popular note-taking system that runs inside the Emacs editor. The program shows your notes as an interactive web of connected dots, similar to how Obsidian draws its graph view. It opens in its own native window, so you do not need to install any Emacs package or open Emacs itself to browse the graph. The tool is written in Rust. It reads the org-roam.db file directly, which is the SQLite database where org-roam stores all the links between notes. When you double-click a note in the graph, Navi sends a message to your running Emacs process through a helper program called emacsclient, which then jumps to the right file or heading inside Emacs. macOS on Apple Silicon is the primary supported platform. A pre-built Navi.app ships with each release; you download a zip from the Releases page, unzip it, and double-click. On first start, Navi tries to find your org-roam.db automatically by checking common locations used by vanilla Emacs, Doom, Spacemacs, and XDG layouts. It then writes a small config file at ~/.config/navi/config.json that you can edit later. Linux builds compile but need a bit of extra glue before the renderer works correctly. Windows is not supported. The interface offers many keyboard and mouse controls: drag to pan, scroll to zoom, click to select a node, press T to cycle colour themes, A to switch to an age heatmap, L to limit the view to nodes within one to three hops of the selection, slash to search by title, and so on. The README also documents a hand-built frame pacer for macOS that ties painting to the display vsync signal, reaching about 4.17 ms per frame on a 240 Hz panel and dropping CPU usage close to zero when the window sits idle. The repository ships as a source release with no LICENSE file included; the author notes that one should be added before redistributing binaries.