FAQ & troubleshooting
Does Clew change my notes?
No. Filters, Color & size groups, saved views, appearance settings, and pinned positions are all Clew's own saved state for the vault - separate from your note content, and never written into your notes' frontmatter or body.
Does Semantic clustering send my notes anywhere?
No. The first time you add a Semantic cluster criterion, Clew downloads a small (~20MB) text-embedding model once, then runs it entirely on your own device to turn each note's title and content into a numeric vector - nothing about your notes is ever sent to a server. See Filter's "Understanding Semantic clustering" for how it works and why it can take a little while the first time.
Nothing shows in the graph
Two possible reasons, and Clew tells you which:
- The vault has no notes at all - the graph shows a card saying so.
- An active filter matches nothing - the graph shows a different card, with a "Reset filter" button. See Filter.
A note isn't where I left it
If you dragged it to pin it, switching layouts and back to Force should restore it - pinning only applies in Force layout (see Interacting with the graph). If it's still not where you expect, check the Appearance panel's "Pinned node positions" - "Clear all" resets every pin, in case one was pinned unintentionally.
Why does the Timeline jump or sit still?
It depends on the pace mode you picked (see Timeline). "Real time" maps playback onto your vault's actual date span, so a long quiet stretch in your notes' history means playback sits still for a while too, before a burst of newer notes appears quickly. "Even pace" instead advances evenly no matter how far apart notes were actually created, so something is always visibly happening - at the cost of the date shown sometimes jumping a lot between two ticks. Neither is wrong; pick whichever reads better for your vault.
"Find path" says no path found - is that a bug?
No - it means the two notes genuinely aren't connected through any chain of links, in either direction. That's a real, useful result on its own (e.g. two completely separate topic areas that have never referenced each other), not an error.
Is my vault too big for this?
Force layout scales to large vaults (it switches to an approximate physics algorithm above a node-count threshold). Hierarchical layout doesn't scale the same way and disables itself above a note-count threshold - the layout picker shows this directly on its row when it applies.
I found a bug / have a feature request
Please open an issue - see the README for details.