Mermaid, DBML, backlinks and a graph — offline, from any folder.
An LLM writes [[Attention Is All You Need]]; the file is
attention-is-all-you-need.md. Detangle resolves it, tells you which
rule it used, and lists every link it couldn't.
Free · Offline · No account · MIT
[[Attention Is All You Need]] -> entities/attention-is-all-you-need.md normalized-name [[getting started#What's next?]] -> wiki/getting-started.md#whats-next case + slugified-anchor [Setup](wiki/setup) -> wiki/setup/index.md folder-index ![[diagram.png|300]] -> assets/diagram.png (width 300) extension probe [[Vaswani]] -> entities/vaswani.md note-relative path [[Transformer]] -> AMBIGUOUS: concepts/…, entities/… needs a choice [[Dose Response]] -> unresolved 3 inbound
Every other viewer matches link text against filenames and shows you a dead link when they differ. Detangle tries fourteen rules in order, stops at the first that matches, and tells you which one fired. Thirteen of them are the machine guessing at your wiki. You write the fourteenth.
1 exact vault path [[wiki/setup/index]] 2 note-relative path a sibling of this page 3 case-sensitive filename [[setup]] 4 path suffix [[setup/index]] 5 case-insensitive filename [[Setup]] 6 normalized name [[Attention Is All You Need]] 7 alias or title aliases:, title:, first H1 8 identifier id:, uid:, permalink:, slug: 9 folder index [Setup](wiki/setup) 10 encoding variant %20, NFC vs NFD 11 extension probe ![[diagram]] 12 nearest name suggested, never followed 13 placeholder reported, not hidden 14 remembered choice you settled this one
Exact matches are drawn as ordinary links. Anything resolved by a fallback gets a dotted underline and a hover that names the rule and the file. A viewer that guesses silently is worse than one that fails loudly.
When a name matches two files, both are listed, the shortest path is used meanwhile, and your choice is remembered for that vault.
sources:, related:, parent: and five
more spellings are resolved like any other link. Dropping them is why other
tools' graphs are smaller than the wiki really is.
#What's next? matches the heading it names — raw text first,
then the slug, then block ids, uuids, line ranges and PDF pages. A fragment
that misses never costs you the page.
No Node, no Chromium, no CDN, and no network access of any kind. Both renderers are .NET libraries running in the same process as the reader.
Twenty-four diagram types through a pure .NET implementation. Renders are cached beside the vault by source and theme, so re-opening a page is instant.
Parsed by a recursive-descent parser written for this app and drawn as an ER diagram. The translation is lossy, so everything it drops — defaults, notes, indexes, table groups — is listed under the picture instead.
A fence that will not parse shows its text and the parser's complaint, with the line. It never renders an empty box.
The conventions genuinely differ — the same link text means different things in different tools — so the folder is sniffed before it is read.
Node size is inbound links, colour is frontmatter type, hollow means nothing links here, and a dashed outline is a page something links to that nobody wrote.
In a wiki a model produced, they are the shape of the work left to do.
The neighbourhood of the page you were reading, N hops out, walked in both directions — a page's backlinks are as much its neighbourhood as its own links.
Repulsion goes through a Barnes-Hut quadtree spread across cores: about 11 ms per simulation step over a 5,000-page vault, inside a 33 ms frame. Above 1,500 nodes it folds to one node per folder, because a hairball is not a picture.
SQLite FTS5 over the whole vault, with a field syntax for the things frontmatter actually holds. Cold index of five thousand files in 3.3 seconds; every keystroke after that answers in under 50 ms.
attention the word, ranked by bm25 "is all you need" the exact phrase type:concept frontmatter type tag:llm and everything under llm/ path:wiki/ a folder updated>2026-06-01 changed since a date
Grouped by kind, worst first, one finding at a time. The card under the list shows the source line beside the line it would write — computed by the same function that performs the fix, so the preview is the fix.
getting-started#opne opens the file, lands you at the top, and
every other reader calls that a working link. Detangle reports it and names the
heading it probably meant.
An ambiguous link shows every file it could mean; pick one and it is remembered for this vault. It is numbered last because it was added last, and consulted first because it is not a guess.
The decision lands in .detangle-choices beside your markdown — one
sorted line per link, with the reason as a comment — so it commits, it diffs,
and everyone who checks the wiki out resolves that link the way you decided.
detangle-lint and the static export read the same file. The Doctor
lists every decision made, with a revoke beside each one.
Line numbers move every time the generator runs, and that is this product's entire corpus. An ignore keyed to one would come back the moment you least want to re-read a list you already finished.
wiki/link-rules.md:38 brokenAnchor No heading or block "What happens on opne" in wiki/getting-started.md. probably "What happens on open" wiki/link-rules.md:40 dialectDrift "Multi-Head!" matched only after slugging; other renderers will not follow it.
In the browser demo, and on a folder Detangle cannot write back to, a settled choice lasts for the session and the app says so rather than claiming a save that will not survive.
Mark the state before the generator runs. Afterwards, Detangle names the links that used to resolve exactly and now resolve only because a later rule rescued them. Every other tool's link is binary — it works or it doesn't — so none of them can describe a link that still works and works worse.
Nothing can fall, because there is nowhere to fall to.
"delta": { "links": { "broke": 0, "healed": 2, "degraded": 5, "improved": 0 }, "regressed": true, "regressions": [ { "source": "wiki/index.md", "target": "Getting Started", "change": "degraded", "was": "exactStem", "now": "normalizedName" } ] }
Mark once with --mark, commit .detangle-baseline.json, then
gate every regeneration on --fail-on-regression: exit 1 when a link broke
or fell, whatever the totals are. An already-broken wiki that did not get worse
passes, which is the whole point — --fail-on error fails on every run
once anything is broken, so it can never tell one run from another.
There is no automatic snapshot. The file watcher fires dozens of times during a generation run, so a guess at when the generator finished would diff against half a corpus — which is worse than no diff. You press a button, or you pass a flag.
detangle-lint runs the identical pass from a terminal and prints JSON.
It ships inside the portable archive rather than the installers — those are for the
reader, this is for the pipeline.
"counts": { "error": 4, "warning": 6, "info": 17, "byKind": { "brokenLink": 4, "ambiguousLink": 2, "duplicateSlug": 4, "nonCanonicalLink": 17, "brokenAnchor": 1, "anchorDialectDrift": 1 } }, "rules": { "wiki": { "noteRelativePath": 1, "pathSuffix": 1, "caseInsensitiveStem": 1, "normalizedName": 3, "alias": 2 } }
Broken-link checkers are twenty years old, and lychee and
markdownlint already emit JSON. What none of them can emit is
which step of the chain each folder's links needed. That is feedback
the generator can act on, and it requires the ladder to exist.
--fail-on error, warning, info or never.A broken link is the only Error, so gating on the default would never notice the interesting findings. The flag exists because otherwise nobody would gate on it at all.
--emit-patch plans the repair. It never applies one.
A unified diff you can read, review or pipe into git apply, with
the rung that resolved each link named above its hunk — so the patch says why,
not only what. The command still writes nothing to your wiki.
Eight links written inside wiki/ resolved. One of them by a rule that is
not a rescue.
The real reader, compiled to WebAssembly, holding a small wiki written the way a model writes one. Open your browser's network tab: after the page loads, it stays empty.
detangle
The real reader, compiled to WebAssembly — about 11 MB of .NET runtime. It does not start downloading until you ask for it.
Load the demoOnce, then it is cached · what differs from the desktop build
Same renderer, same resolver, same diagrams. The desktop build adds search, the file watcher, editing and export. Jump straight to the Mermaid page or the DBML page.
Local-first is a set of decisions, not a slogan. These are the ones that cost something.
Unless you ask: saving, applying a fix, creating a missing note, or normalizing
links. Its index lives in a .detangle/ folder you can delete.
Static site, one HTML file, PDF, or normalized markdown — all built from the resolved model, so a link found by an alias is a working link in the output.
One binary with the runtime inside it. Nothing to install first, no version to match, and no dependency that can go missing.
Ten pages, written for somebody deciding whether this is worth the disk space.
Version 0.2.0, free and MIT. A release carries forty-three files; nine of them are for a person, and the rest is the update feed. These are the nine. Every build is 17–31 MB because the runtime is inside it — there is nothing to install first.
Pick your platform below.
Not sure which file? Each one says what it is for.
Detangle-osx-arm64-Setup.pkg
Apple Silicon — every Mac since 2020. Start here.
Detangle-osx-x64-Setup.pkg
Intel Macs. Apple menu → About This Mac will say which you have.
Detangle-osx-arm64-Portable.zip
No installer: unzip it and run it. Nothing is written outside the folder.
Not notarized, so the first launch needs a right-click → Open, or:
Detangle-win-x64-Setup.exe
Intel or AMD, which is almost every PC. Start here.
Detangle-win-arm64-Setup.exe
ARM machines — Surface Pro X, Snapdragon laptops.
Detangle-win-x64-Portable.zip
No installer, no uninstaller, no Start menu entry.
Not signed with a paid certificate, so SmartScreen warns once: choose More info, then Run anyway.
Detangle-linux-x64.AppImage
Any distribution. Make it executable and run it; nothing is installed.
detangle_0.2.0_amd64.deb
Debian and Ubuntu, with a desktop entry. arm64 is published too.
detangle-0.2.0-linux-x64.tar.gz
The application and detangle-lint together, for CI.
The optional WebView diagram backend wants libwebkit2gtk-4.1-0.
Nothing else does, which is why it is a recommendation and not a dependency.
RELEASES-*, assets.*.json, releases.*.json
and *-full.nupkg are the update feed. The application reads them to
find its next version; you never download one. SHA256SUMS is the
checksum list for everything above, so you can check that what you downloaded is
what was built.
detangle-0.2.0-win-x64.zip and its siblings are
not the same as Detangle-win-x64-Portable.zip: the lower-case archive
carries detangle-lint beside the application, and the other is the
reader on its own.
Signing certificates cost money this project does not take, which is the whole reason
for the two warnings above — the code is
right here if you would rather
build it: dotnet publish src/Detangle.Desktop and nothing else.