3D Editor · Semantix

Semantix draws your project as a graph in three dimensions, and every file in it is a small badge: an extruded shield with an icon on its face and the filename floating above. Out of the box every one of them looks the same.

The 3D Editor is where that stops being true. You can change the silhouette, the metal, the glow, the icon — and you can change them per file type, so a project renders as a map you can read at a glance instead of a cloud of identical chips.

Note

The 3D Editor ships in a follow-on release, after the first public beta. It is finished and it is in the build — the activation is simply hidden, so a beta user doesn't stumble onto it before it gets its own moment. If the menu item below isn't there, that's why.

Opening it#

The editor lives inside the 3D graph, so the graph has to be on and on screen.

1. Make sure the 3D view is enabled. Settings → General → Graph → the 3D graph view checkbox. It's on by default. Turned off, the whole 3D viewer stops — no rendering, no physics — and the editor has nothing to attach to.

2. Be looking at a graph. A directory or overview graph, not a file open in the code view.

3. Open the editor. Menu bar → User → 3D View Editor, or press Ctrl+Shift+U (Cmd+Shift+U on macOS). The same item closes it again. The shortcut is rebindable in Settings → Keybindings, under the row named 3D View Editor.

There is no toolbar button. The menu item and the shortcut are the two doors.

What opens is a floating window titled 3D Viewer Editor with two tabs — Nodes and Physics. Everything on these pages is the Nodes tab. It's a normal Semantix window: drag it by the title bar, resize it, minimise it, maximise it. It does not remember where you put it.

Nothing changes until you press Apply#

This is the one rule worth learning before anything else, because every control in the editor obeys it and none of them announce it.

Every knob, chip and colour you touch edits a draft. The preview pane on the right updates immediately. The actual graph behind the window does not. It keeps the look it had until you press Apply, at which point the draft becomes the live style and is saved to disk in one move.

That is a deliberate trade. You can drag a slider across its whole range on a graph of ten thousand nodes without the scene rebuilding under you, and you can walk away from an experiment by never pressing Apply.

Two footnotes to the rule. The preview is the only place a draft is visible, and the preview pane hides itself when the window is too narrow — squeeze the window and you're turning knobs blind, so keep it wide enough to keep the preview on screen. And two settings can leak early: node size and the glyph controls are read as each node is built, so if something else causes the graph to rebuild while you have uncommitted changes — navigating into a folder, an agent creating a file — those two land without an Apply. Everything else waits.

Important

Reset obeys the same rule, which surprises people. It restores the factory look in the draft — the preview goes back to grey immediately — but it does not touch the live graph and it does not touch what's saved on disk. Press Reset and reload without pressing Apply, and your old style comes straight back. Reset then Apply is what actually clears it.

Reset also deletes every per-file-type override you have, in one click, with no confirmation and no undo.

What it styles, and what it doesn't#

File nodes only. Everything in this editor — shape, material, glow, glyph, size — applies to the badges that represent files.

Folder nodes, the project-root node and every other kind of node in the graph are drawn by separate code with their own fixed appearance. No setting here reaches them. If you style your files into neon glass and the folders stay the same yellow, that is not a bug.

Where your styles are kept#

Node styles are stored per user, not per project — in ~/.semantix/USER/, alongside your themes. Open a different project and your look comes with you.

They do not travel to another machine. A project directory contains nothing about how you styled it, so cloning a repo somewhere else gets you the factory grey. Moving a look between machines, or handing one to somebody else, is what export and import are for.

The rest of these pages#

Shape and size — the silhouette, your own SVGs, and the extrusion knobs that give a badge depth and bevel.
Colour and material — metal, roughness, glass, glow, two-stop gradients, and the one checkbox that colours a whole project by language.
Glyphs — the icon on the badge's face: what it is by default, and how to replace it for a file type.
Styling one file type — how .ts gets to look different from .py, and the inheritance rule underneath it.
Saved styles, export and import — naming a look, keeping several, and moving one to another machine.
Ask Claude for a style — describing a look in words and getting a document back.