Build an simple Obsidian-Style Notes Viewer with Graph Visualization

Level: Real World

Your task for today is to create a desktop notes application that reads local markdown files, supports wiki-style linking with [[brackets]], and visualizes connections between notes in an interactive graph — bringing the power of Obsidian’s knowledge graph to your own Python app. Lets to it!

Project Task

Create an Obsidian-style notes viewer that:

• Uses tkinter to create a desktop GUI application

• Loads and displays all markdown files from a selected folder

• Shows notes list in a sidebar and content in a text editor

• Supports wiki-style links using [[note name]] syntax

• Extracts links from notes using regular expressions

• Allows editing and saving notes directly in the app

• Generates a graph view showing connections between notes

• Uses NetworkX to build the connection graph

• Visualizes the graph with matplotlib showing nodes and edges

This project gives you hands-on practice with GUI development, regex patterns, graph theory, data visualization, and building knowledge management tools — essential skills for creating complex desktop applications.

Expected Output

The program automatically lists all .md files on the left sidebar. Clicking a file on the sidebar displays the content of that file and the user can edit the content:

Just like in Obsidian, if the user uses [[note_name]] syntax to link to another note, a link is created between those two notes and all the links are visualized in the graph view:

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Skeleton and Solution

Below you will find both a downloadable skeleton.py file to help you code the project with comment guides and the downloadable solution.py file containing the correct solution.

Get the code skeleton here: