Drag & arrange
Grab any node and place it. The layout settles once and then holds still — no perpetual jitter.
Structure
Links & the graph
A note becomes useful the moment it stops being alone.
Organization in Arf is a hybrid, because that is what researchers actually use in practice. You get folders and subfolders for coarse structure, concept hashtags for categories, and links for the real conceptual relationships between ideas. None of them is mandatory; you can save a note with no folder and no tag and only connect it later.
Links that survive a rename
You link one note to another by referring to it, and Arf keeps track of the relationship in both directions. The note you point to shows a backlinks list — a quiet "referenced in" section at the foot of the page — so you discover the connections you forgot you made.
The important detail is under the surface. Every note carries a stable identifier that never changes, and links resolve to that identifier rather than to a filename. So you can rename a note, in Arf or in Finder, and every link to it still holds. Link rot from renaming, the quiet way a note collection falls apart, does not happen here.
Portable by default
Links are written as ordinary Markdown, so a vault dropped into a GitHub repository or another editor still renders. Wiki-style [[links]] are available as an option for those who prefer them.
Tags for concepts
A hashtag like #decoherence groups notes by concept, and tags nest — #method/statistics — so you can be as coarse or as fine as you like. Clicking a tag filters your notes to it. Tags and folders answer different questions: a folder is where a note lives, a tag is what it is about, and a link is how it relates to another idea.
The knowledge graph
Most note tools ship a graph that looks impressive in a screenshot and turns into an unreadable hairball the moment you have real notes. Arf takes the opposite approach.
The everyday graph is local: it shows the note you are reading and its immediate neighbours, one or two hops out. It is small, legible, and always about where you are. When you want the whole picture, a single click opens the full-window graph of your entire vault, and it is built to be used, not just admired:
Move
Look
Zoom, pan, hover
Scroll to zoom toward the cursor, drag the background to pan, and hover a node to light up its neighbourhood while the rest recedes.
Select
Multi-select
Ctrl-click (⌘-click on a Mac) gathers several nodes at once, so you can reason about a cluster rather than one note at a time.
The graph reads in ink, not colour. A node's size grows with how many links point to it; a filled circle has connections while a hollow one is still an orphan; solid edges are links you made, and dashed edges are the machine's suggestions. Nothing depends on colour alone, so it stays legible for everyone.