Big projects and performance

The obvious worry about drawing a whole codebase in 3D is that a real codebase is enormous. Here is what actually happens, and what the viewer does about it without asking you.

There is no node limit#

Semantix doesn't cap the graph, sample it, or silently drop the tail. Whatever is in the folder you're looking at is what you see.

It gets away with that because it only ever draws one folder level at a time. The default view is a folder's direct contents — not the repository. A monorepo with two hundred thousand files opens as the handful of top-level directories it actually contains, and you go deeper only where you choose to.

Cross-folder relationships are bundled rather than drawn individually: everything connecting two folders becomes a single wire whose thickness carries the count. That's why a large project reads as a small number of heavy connections instead of a hairball.

The cost of depth is yours to spend. Expand a folder and its contents join the scene; expand five and you're carrying all five.

The quality ladder#

If the frame rate drops and stays down, the viewer quietly steps down its own quality — first rendering at three-quarter resolution, then at half, and at the lowest step hiding the name labels on distant nodes while keeping the ones near you.

It steps back up when the machine recovers, and it won't flap between the two.

There is no quality setting, and there is no notification. What you experience is that the graph stays smooth and gets a little softer, and on a machine with no real graphics hardware it starts at the lowest step from the first frame rather than stuttering its way down to it.

This is deliberate: a frame-rate slider is a question most people can't answer, asked at the worst possible moment.

Where your arrangements live#

Two things are remembered automatically, per folder level, per project:

• The camera — where you were standing and what you were looking at.
• Node positions — anything you dragged.

They're stored with the project's local state, so they survive restarting Semantix, and they don't travel to another machine. Cloning your repo somewhere else gets you a fresh layout.

Turning it off completely#

Settings → General → Graph → uncheck 3D graph view.

This is a real off switch, not a hide. No rendering, no physics, no animation, no graphics context — the 3D viewer is never created. Folder tabs become a plain empty surface and everything else works as normal.

Worth reaching for if you're on a laptop on battery, on a remote desktop, or on a machine whose GPU you'd rather spend elsewhere. Nothing else in Semantix depends on it — the index, the agents, the editor and search all work identically with the viewer off.

Making the space bigger#

Two shortcuts give the graph the screen without turning anything off:

• Ctrl+B hides the whole left panel — the file explorer and search along with it.
• Ctrl+Shift+A hides the agent panel.

Hide both and the 3D view has the whole window.

Styling what you're looking at#

Everything above is about the viewer. What the nodes inside it look like — the shape of a file badge, its metal and glow, the icon on its face, and styling .ts differently from .py — is a separate tool with its own pages: the 3D Editor.