Highlight the objects one hop from the selection - #9
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A CTI graph is a star and no automatic layout makes one readable; that was measured, at length, and it is why the re-layout became a menu of arrangements instead. What does make a star readable is asking it rather than drawing it: select an object and what it touches lights up, wherever the arrangement happened to put it. Neighbours take a 3px ring plus a halo, in a second canvas colour named `--linked`. A different hue rather than a thinner ring of the accent, because it has to read as "related to" and never as "also selected"; and three pixels rather than two, because two of a quiet hue read as a rendering artefact and the eye went straight past the answer. Everything the selection does not touch steps back to 45%, which is what makes the ring land at a glance. Not the 20% the search uses: a search is a question about the whole canvas and answers it by elimination, whereas selecting is also the everyday way to open the inspector, and dimming that hard on every click would turn an ordinary gesture into a light show. The relationships the selection is an end of come forward in the same colour while the others go to 15% - the ring says which objects, only the edge says which link, and thirty-five other edges cross that answer. Faded, not hidden: an edge that vanishes while an object is selected reads as an edge that was deleted. Derived from React Flow's own selection rather than kept in state, on the model of the search highlight right above it, so there is no second copy to disagree. When a search is running its verdict keeps the opacity and the ring is added on top: a neighbour the search rejected must not come back from the dead. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Ringing the neighbours on every selection sounds free and is not. Selecting is also how you pick an object up to move it, so rearranging a canvas meant the whole thing dimmed and undimmed under the cursor at every click. A signal that fires when nobody asked a question stops being a signal. So it is a mode now, reached by "l" for links or by a toolbar toggle, and it starts off. When it is off the canvas behaves exactly as it did before the highlight existed. A mode with no visible state is a trap, so this one announces itself twice: the toolbar button latches in the colour of what it switches on, and the toggle says so out loud for the times it was reached by the keyboard. It is also in the shortcuts sheet and in the command palette, whose entry names the direction it will go rather than the mode it is in. The key is a bare letter, guarded like "/" is: pressing "l" while writing in a field types an l. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Closes #8.
What it does
Selecting an object rings what it is directly connected to, brings the relationships it is an end of forward, and steps everything else back. It works whatever arrangement the canvas is currently in, which is the point: the layout no longer has to carry the structure.
Why it is a mode, off by default
Ringing the neighbours on every selection sounds free and is not. Selecting is also how you pick an object up to move it, so rearranging a canvas meant the whole thing dimming and undimming under the cursor at every click. A signal that fires when nobody asked a question stops being a signal.
So it is reached by
lfor links, or by a toolbar toggle, and it starts off. When it is off the canvas behaves exactly as it did before.A mode with no visible state is a trap, so this one announces itself twice: the toolbar button latches in the colour of what it switches on, and the toggle says so out loud for the times it was reached by the keyboard. It is in the shortcuts sheet and in the command palette too.
Choices worth arguing with
Verified in the browser
On a real 31-object, 37-relationship investigation: selection with the mode off changes nothing;
lrings 5 neighbours, dims 25 objects and brings 5 relationships forward;lagain undoes it; the toolbar button does the same; and typinglin a text field writes an l instead of toggling.509 tests,
tscclean.