Big projects and performance
What happens when the project is huge, where your arrangements are kept, and the switches that give the sky the screen or take it away.
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 folders you've opened is what you see.
It gets away with that because it draws only what you've unfolded. A project opens as its top-level folders — rings, with the files at that level as orbs — and you go deeper only where you choose to, one folder at a time or all at once with Expand All Folders. A monorepo with two hundred thousand files opens as the handful of directories it actually contains.
Cross-folder relationships are drawn once each rather than once per import, and folder-to-folder wires draw thin. That's why a large project reads as a lattice of folders with bright bolts inside them instead of a hairball.
The cost of depth is yours to spend. Expand a folder and its contents join the scene; expand fifty and you're carrying all fifty. Collapse All Folders on the sky's right-click menu takes it back to the top.
What it costs, and when#
The sky draws every frame while it's on screen, whether or not anything is moving. Under a file tab it stops entirely; under a surface tab, or while the terminal has focus, it drops to a low frame rate as a backdrop. There is no quality ladder that steps resolution down under load — what you get is the sky at full quality, or the sky asleep.
Switch on Info in the menu bar's Panels bubble and a small readout appears top right: which level you're looking at, how many nodes and edges are drawn, the frame rate, and a GPU LOST alarm if the browser has taken the sky's graphics context away — reload if it doesn't come back on its own.
Where your arrangements live#
Two things are remembered automatically, per folder level, per project, on this machine:
- The layout — where every orb settled.
- The camera — where you were standing and what you were looking at.
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.
Reload, on the sky's right-click menu and the project tab's, throws both away and redraws the level cold. It's the reset for a scene that has settled into a shape you don't like.
Turning it off completely#
Settings → Graph & Explorer → 3D graph view, or the Toggle 3D graph on/off icon in the menu bar. The same switch, remembered per project.
This is a real off switch, not a hide. No rendering, no physics, no animation, no graphics context — the 3D viewer is never created. A folder click in the explorer becomes a plain selection, 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 sky the screen without turning anything off:
- Ctrl+B hides the explorer panel.
- Ctrl+Shift+A hides the agent panel.
Hide both — or press F11 for full screen — and the 3D view has the whole window. Ctrl+Shift+G hides the navigation dial and camera buttons if you want the scene bare.
Styling what you're looking at#
Everything above is about the viewer. What the orbs and bolts look like — the colours per extension, the glow, the presets — is shared with the Memory tab's sky and is a follow-on release; today the look is the one that ships.