Traverse Notes

Traverse Notes let you generate a hierarchy from your existing wikilinks without adding frontmatter to every note. Annotate a single root note and Breadcrumbs walks its link graph automatically.

Frontmatter

Add the following to the root note:

---
BC-traverse-note-field: "<field>"
---

Where <field> is one of your edge fields. Breadcrumbs performs an iterative depth-first search (DFS) starting from that note, following resolved wikilinks and markdown links. It generates one edge per parent→child hop in the DFS tree, all typed with the field you specify.

No special frontmatter is required on the linked notes — only the root note needs the annotation.

Example

Given a root note Index.md that links to Topic A.md and Topic B.md, and Topic A.md links to Subtopic.md:

# Index.md
---
BC-traverse-note-field: down
---

[[Topic A]] [[Topic B]]

graph TB
  1(Index.md) -->|down| 2(Topic A.md)
  1(Index.md) -->|down| 3(Topic B.md)
  2(Topic A.md) -->|down| 4(Subtopic.md)

Breadcrumbs generates down edges: Index → Topic A, Index → Topic B, Topic A → Subtopic.

Behavior

• DFS tree only — each note is visited at most once. If a note is reachable via multiple paths, only the first path (DFS order) produces an edge to it.
• Cycles ignored — already-visited notes are skipped, so circular link structures do not cause infinite loops.
• Resolved links only — only wikilinks and markdown links that Obsidian has resolved to a real vault file produce edges. Unresolved links (broken links, links to non-existent notes) are silently skipped.

Settings

• Default field: Choose a fallback field to use when BC-traverse-note-field is present but has no value. Useful if you want a vault-wide default so you can write BC-traverse-note-field: with no value on each root note.

When to use Traverse Notes

Traverse notes work well when:

• You have an existing hub note or index that already links to a set of related notes via wikilinks.
• You want a quick hierarchy without manually adding up/down frontmatter to every note.
• The structure is a tree (or close enough — DFS handles non-trees by picking one path per node).

For more precise control over which notes are related, consider Typed Links (explicit per-note frontmatter) or List Notes (a note whose list items name its children).