Maps & Manuals
Maps are notes Altretta generates for you that index and summarize your vault — giving you a living table of contents that stays current because it's built from Altretta's real semantic graph.
Every serious knowledge base needs entry points: overview notes that tell you what's in an area and where to start. Altretta builds and maintains them for you.
This is a headline differentiator. In Obsidian you hand-curate a Map of Content — a note you write and update yourself, which drifts the moment the underlying notes change. Altretta generates the map from the semantic graph and keeps it current, so your index reflects what's actually in the vault right now, not what it looked like the last time you remembered to tidy it.
Generate a map
Generate the maps
Run map generation for the vault. Altretta reads the semantic graph and writes a set of map notes into a _maps/ folder.
Read what it found
The maps cover the vault's hub entry points, its semantic topic clusters, its orphan notes (written but connected to nothing), and indices by tag and type — plus guidance on where to start.
Use them as your entry point
Open a map to get oriented and navigate in. Link the ones you rely on from your vault's home note as a durable table of contents.
Why "from the graph" matters
A hand-written index is a snapshot that starts rotting immediately. Because Altretta's maps are derived from the semantic graph — the real relationships between your notes, not just a folder listing — they reflect the current state of the vault and can be regenerated as it grows. Your table of contents keeps up with your thinking instead of lagging behind it.
- Living, not static — regenerate to reflect new and changed notes.
- Structural, not just a file list — it groups and summarizes by how notes actually relate.
- Beyond manual Maps of Content — you get the entry point without the upkeep.
Generated maps are marked as generated and live in _maps/, so regenerating replaces them cleanly rather than fighting with anything you wrote by hand. They stay in your vault folder but are excluded from sync, since every device can generate its own from the same notes.
Use Maps for the big picture and Bases for the structured detail: a Map summarizes and orients you within an area, while a Base tabulates its notes by their properties. Together they cover "what's here and where do I start?" and "show me all of it, filtered and sorted."
Related
Organizing your vault
The overview: files, search, bookmarks, daily notes, templates, and Bases.
The semantic graph ✦
The real graph a map is built from — not a folder listing.
Grounded, cited answers ✦
The same graph traversal that builds maps lets your AI answer from your notes, with sources.
Bases: tables & cards
Structure the notes inside an area as filterable, sortable views.
Glossary
Map of Content, semantic graph, index — defined.