Graph controls: filter, find, and export

Your graph has grown for weeks. Somewhere in that slowly spinning cloud of nodes are the few hubs you actually care about, and you want them alone on screen. Tomorrow you also want a clean, looping animation of the whole thing for a slide.

Both come from a small set of floating controls on the graph canvas. This lesson covers all of them, from the three floating buttons to the dialog that saves your graph as a PNG, GIF, or video.

Three floating buttons

The graph keeps its controls in the top corners, out of your way. One corner holds the hint overlay, the three mouse rows that remind you how to rotate, pan, and zoom. The other holds three round buttons, called FABs (floating action buttons).

Inside "View settings"

Click the eye FAB and a single compact dropdown opens. It controls everything the canvas shows, and each control does one clear job:

Below the toggles you get a live stats readout ("Nodes", "Edges", "Themes", "Orphans") and two actions. "Save as image or video" opens the export dialog, and "Reset all settings" puts every setting back to the defaults above.

"Find in graph" and the Reset button

With the graph tab active, press ⌘F and the titlebar search relabels itself "Find in graph". As you type, matching nodes pulse, non-matching edges dim, and a counter shows "n/m". Typing never moves the camera on its own.

Mod+Shift+G    open / toggle the Knowledge graph tab
Cmd/Ctrl+F     "Find in graph" (while the graph tab is active)
Enter          fly to the next match (wraps around)
Shift+Enter    fly to the previous match (wraps around)
Esc            clear search / close popovers

The Reset button ("Reset to home view") peels back one level per press. A drilled-in theme goes back to the theme map, a drilled-in collection member goes back to the collection set, and the set goes back to the whole graph. Stuck zoomed in? Press it again.

The "Collections" button, briefly

The stacked-squares FAB opens the "Collections" popover. A collection is a saved set of entities defined by rules.

Click a saved row and that set projects onto the canvas: its members get isolated and "Color by type" switches on by itself (your old setting returns when you clear). While a set is projected, the FAB shows a count badge and the popover shows an "Applied · {count}" banner with a "Clear" button. Writing the rules that define a collection gets its own lesson.

FAB

Floating action button. One of the small round buttons hovering over the graph canvas.

Detail

The single visibility knob (0 to 1): turn it up for more labels and less depth fog.

Orphan node

A node with no connections. "Show orphan nodes" shows or hides them.

Minimum connections

A filter that hides entities below a connection threshold, leaving only the hubs.

Map mode

A view that collapses the graph to one super-node per theme.

Collection

A saved recipe for a living set of entities, re-checked against the current graph every time.

"Save as image or video"

At the bottom of "View settings" is "Save as image or video". It opens the "Save knowledge graph" dialog, which exports the whole graph (nodes, connections, and labels) as an image or a looping animation. Three format cards come first:

• "Effect" (animations only): Turntable is a plain spin. Orbit, the default, is a tilted diagonal orbit. Breathe dollies the camera in and out. Pulse pulses the whole graph. Showcase combines orbit and pulse.
• "Quality": Original / High / Medium / Small. Original matches the live view. High, Medium, and Small shrink the long edge to 1600, 1080, and 720 px for a lighter file.
• "Speed" (animations only): Slow / Normal / Fast, at 10, 6, or 3 seconds per revolution.
• "Frame rate" (video only): 24, 30, or 60 fps, with 30 as the default.
• "Include background color" (PNG only, default on): paints the light or dark canvas color behind the graph. Animations always include the background.

Every animation renders exactly one full revolution, so it loops without a visible seam. While it saves, you'll see "Rendering frame {done}/{total}…" and then "Encoding…". The default filename is knowledge-graph.

That's the whole control surface: three buttons, one dropdown, one search box, and one export dialog. Together they turn a thousand-node tangle into exactly the picture you need, on screen or saved to a file. Next, see how the graph keeps itself current as the files underneath it change.