Agate

gallery

Made with Agate.

Every example is a real note in the demo vault: a plain Vega or Vega-Lite spec over ordinary notes. Each shows the Agate feature it leans on and links to its spec, note and base in the repo. Click a picture to see it larger.

Minard's map of Napoleon's 1812 campaign: the army as a gold band to Moscow and a dark band back, the battles marked, and the temperature on the retreat below maps · history

Minard's 1812, from battle notes

The army's path and width come from Minard's own figures; every battle is a note in a base, so adding one drops a mark on the map. Hover a battle for the note's date, outcome and phase, click it to open the note. The temperature on the retreat sits underneath, on the same scale.

feature: layered maps · tooltips from note properties · open on click · campaign-1812.vg.json

in the demo vault: note · base · battle notes

After W. E. B. Du Bois, 1900: the assessed value of furniture owned by Black Georgians, 1875 to 1899, as six bands that start at the top and wrap clockwise, curling inward static · no base

Du Bois, 1900

A static chart in a note, with no base behind it: the six figures sit in the spec, and a code block draws them. After W. E. B. Du Bois's portrait of the furniture owned by Black Georgians, 1875–1899, made for the 1900 Paris Exposition (the original, Library of Congress). As in his plate, it is a bar chart wrapped into a spiral: each year's band starts at the top beside its label and runs clockwise, curling inward as it wraps, its length proportional to the value.

feature: static charts in notes · any Vega spec · dubois-furniture.vg.json

in the demo vault: note (no base)

Brooklyn's 1938 HOLC map: zones in muted green, blue, yellow and pink over a fine street grid, ungraded land lightly crosshatched, a plain title panel with the HOLC's grade descriptions maps · history

Redlining in Brooklyn, 1938

The HOLC's "residential security" grades, A (best) to D (hazardous): the D zones were denied mortgage backing, the origin of "redlining". Drawn quietly after the original sheet, where the grades were printed over Hagstrom's street map: muted colors over a fine street grid, ungraded land in a light crosshatch, the HOLC's own grade words in quotes, in New York's Long Island state plane projection. Today's shoreline sits underneath for orientation. Both GeoJSON files live in the vault as ordinary files. Grades: Mapping Inequality, University of Richmond (CC-BY-NC); shoreline: NYC Department of City Planning.

feature: vault files as data · SVG textures · redlining-brooklyn.vl.json

in the demo vault: note (no base) · GeoJSON files

Gapminder's wealth and health of nations: one bubble per country by income and life expectancy in 2007, sized by population, with faint trails back to 1952 per-note data · animation

The wealth and health of nations

Hans Rosling's chart, 1952–2007: income per person against life expectancy, a bubble per country sized by population, with a year slider and faint trails behind. Every country is a note with its continent as a property and its own CSV, so filtering the base to one continent redraws the world. Data: Gapminder (CC BY 4.0).

feature: per-note data · bound sliders · open on click · gapminder.vl.json

in the demo vault: note · base · country notes

Hierarchical edge bundling of the vault: notes on a circle grouped by folder, links between them bundled through the folder tree networks · pure vega

How the vault links, bundled

Every note that links or is linked sits on the circle, grouped by folder; each link curves through the folder tree, so meetings bundle into people and projects, plays into games, trips into places. Hover a note to light up its links. Vega-Lite has no tree layout or bundled lines; full Vega does, and Agate hands it both the folder tree and the links.

feature: the folder tree · links as edges · Vega-only layouts · vault-links.vg.json

in the demo vault: note · base (Links view)

A globe with great-circle trip routes from New York, colored by family, work and personal maps

Trips on a globe you can spin

Trip notes list their stops; place notes carry coordinates. Every leg is a great circle on an orthographic globe you drag to rotate.

feature: map projections · links between notes · travel-globe.vg.json

in the demo vault: note · base · trips · places

A sunburst of the vault's folders and notes sized by bytes, with a legend of the top-level folders hierarchies

The vault itself

A DaisyDisk-style sunburst of folders and files, arc length by bytes. Click a ring to zoom into a folder, the center to go back up, a file to open it.

feature: the folder tree · partition layout · open on click · vault-sunburst.vg.json

in the demo vault: note · base (Sunburst view)

your look

Any look, including your own.

Pick a theme for the whole vault in settings, or per chart in the view's Theme option.

Built in, and alive

  • obsidian reads your Obsidian fonts and colors, and redraws the moment you switch light or dark.
  • instrument is the same, redrawn as a monochrome readout for dense time series.

Every stock Vega theme

excel fivethirtyeight ggplot2 googlecharts latimes powerbi quartz urbaninstitute vox dark carbonwhite carbong10 carbong90 carbong100

Or make your own

  • Theme file: a Vega config (JSON or YAML) in your vault, merged over the chosen theme. The Du Bois look at the bottom right is one file: du-bois.json.
  • Config overrides in settings, for a font or a color or two.
  • Copy theme prompt: an assistant drafts the file from your current Obsidian theme and a description of the look you want.
  • Plugins can register named themes through Agate's API.

How themes work →

Board-game nights by month and the shelf, in the stock fivethirtyeight themestock · fivethirtyeight
The Journal note: headline numbers, a habit grid and a mood line in the vault's own colorsobsidian
The AT Georgia note: a hike dashboard drawn as a monochrome instrument readoutinstrument
The same board-game chart in a custom Du Bois theme: cream paper, condensed lettering, crimson and goldcustom · du bois

beyond pure vega

What Agate adds to the spec.

A plain Vega spec only sees the data you give it. Agate also hands it the web, each note's own files, the base's totals and real map tiles. Each tile links to the recipe in the guide.

A board-game tooltip showing cover art fetched from a URL
remote

Fetched from the web

A note can carry a URL: a cover for the tooltip, or a dataset. Remote data loads only once you allow it.

How to →
Horizon chart of twelve market series, one strip per note, each loaded from that note's own CSV
per-note data

Each note's own data

Point each note at a CSV or a URL; Agate loads one dataset per note. Here, twelve market notes, each with its own FRED series.

How to →
Rows of big headline numbers from five notes: plays, trips, practice attempts, hike miles and Napoleon's army
stats

Aggregate counters

Counts, sums and averages over the base as big headline numbers that update with every note. Vega does the maths.

How to →
The Appalachian Trail route from Springer Mountain to Neel Gap over a colorful OpenTopoMap basemap
basemaps

Set the basemap

Real map tiles under your routes: topo, hillshade or satellite, keyless out of the box. Keyed providers read their token from Obsidian's secret storage.

How to →

More in the repo: a sankey across properties, an arc diagram of links over time, a linked dashboard, and a beeswarm.

Make one over your own notes.

Pick a recipe or prompt an assistant — no chart library to learn.

Five-minute quickstart Full guide