Viewing the Graph
You've created nodes and connected them. Now let's explore what you've built.
Deciduous provides three ways to view your graph:
- Terminal UI (TUI) — Rich vim-style interface
- Web Viewer — Browser-based with multiple visualizations
- CLI — Quick queries from the command line
The Web Viewer
Start the web server:
$ deciduous serve Starting graph viewer at http://localhost:3000 Auto-refresh enabled (30 second interval) Press Ctrl+C to stop
Open http://localhost:3000 in your browser.
[SCREENSHOT: web-viewer-chains.png]
The web viewer showing the Chains view with our authentication decision chain
The web viewer has four views:
| View | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Chains | Decision chains organized by flow |
| Timeline | Chronological list of all nodes |
| Graph | Force-directed interactive visualization |
| DAG | Hierarchical directed acyclic graph |
Try clicking around—click nodes to see details, use the branch filter in the top bar, and switch between views.
The Terminal UI
For a keyboard-driven experience:
$ deciduous tui
[SCREENSHOT: tui-main.png]
The TUI with timeline on the left and detail panel on the right
Quick navigation:
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| j / k | Move down / up |
| gg | Jump to top |
| G | Jump to bottom |
| Enter | Toggle detail panel |
| / | Search |
| f | Filter by type |
| q | Quit |
Press ? for full help.
The CLI
For quick queries:
$ deciduous nodes ID Type Title Status Confidence ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── 1 goal Implement user authentication active 90 2 decision Choose authentication method active 75 ... $ deciduous edges From To Type Rationale ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── 1 2 leads_to Need to decide approach ... $ deciduous graph > graph.json # Exports full graph as JSON
A Recap
You now know the core of deciduous:
- Nodes represent decisions, goals, actions, outcomes, options, and observations
- Edges connect nodes to show relationships and flow
- The graph persists in SQLite and survives session boundaries
- Viewers (web, TUI, CLI) let you explore and query the graph
But here's the thing: manually running deciduous add commands is tedious. The real power comes when Claude does it automatically as part of the development workflow.
That's what the next chapter is about.