Related notes and the graph

Canto connects your notes two ways: through the links you make, and through what notes are about. The inspector's Context shows both for the note in front of you, and the vault graph draws them for your whole vault. Both are worked out on your Mac.

Context: what a note is connected to#

Open the inspector's Context tab (⌥⌘I moves to the inspector; ⋯ › Related notes and backlinks in a note's header opens it). It has:

• Linked mentions: notes that link to this one, each with the sentence it links from. Click one to open it, or ⌘-click to open it beside.
• Related notes · on this Mac: notes about the same thing, found by search by meaning, each with a meter for how close it is.
• Sources: the note's references. Click one to open it; Manage references… opens the list.
• Evidence: a research note's evidence ledger, in brief.
• Outline: the note's headings. Click one to scroll there.

You can hide Related notes in Settings › Memory & privacy › Search by meaning, with Show related notes beside a note.

Canto also suggests links: the Inbox lists pairs of notes that look alike but don't link to each other, with Link them (see The Inbox), and a canvas can Link related notes on its own (see Canvases).

The vault graph#

⇧⌘G (Go › Vault Graph, or Vault graph in the sidebar's Library) opens a living map of your notes. It settles, drifts gently for half a minute after you touch it, then rests. Drag a note and its links follow; point at one to see its neighbourhood.

• Find a note lights up the matches and flies to the one you choose (/ jumps to the field).
• Show turns each layer on and off without rearranging the map: Links (the links you made), Similar (notes that mean the same thing, joined by a dashed line), Tags (each tag joined to its notes) and Folders (as soft groups).
• List shows the same notes and links as a list. Motion or Still stops the drift; with Reduce Motion on in macOS, the graph lays itself out before it appears and stays still.
• Zoom with + and −, and 0 fits the whole graph.

Click a note to see a card with what it links to and what it resembles (Similar in meaning). Open note (or ↩) opens it in the same pane, and ⌘[ brings the graph back. ⌥-click opens a note beside the graph. Only nearby shows just the notes within two links of this one.

From the keyboard, the arrow keys walk from a note to the notes it links to.

The graph opens where you left it. Large vaults stay smooth: 5,000 notes open in a moment. Notes changed by other apps, the Inbox, meetings, imports or your other Macs show up in an open graph. Choose what a new graph shows in Settings › General › Vault graph; changes you make in the graph are kept there too.

Search by meaning#

Search by meaning finds notes by what they're about, not only the words in them. It powers Related notes, the graph's Similar layer, the Inbox's link suggestions, and the meaning half of search.

It runs entirely inside Canto, with a small model (MiniLM) that ships with the app. Nothing is fetched from the web to start it, it works offline, and nothing leaves your Mac. It's on by default, in Settings › Memory & privacy › Search by meaning.

Its status reads the same everywhere (Settings, the status dot's panel, the Context tab and ⌘K):

Index every note now (Index now) catches up notes that haven't been indexed yet. ⌘K's Search by meaning: what it's doing shows where it stands.

Notes it skipped#

If Canto's window stops three times while it indexes the same note, Canto leaves that note out of search by meaning and related notes, so one note can't keep breaking it. Quitting or updating Canto while it indexes never counts against a note.

Settings › Advanced › Diagnostics › Notes search by meaning skipped lists those notes, with Try again. Each new version of Canto tries them again by itself. The notes are still found by their words.

If search by meaning keeps needing attention, see Troubleshooting.