The Obsidian Color Group Query Syntax That Turned My Vault Into A Brain

My Obsidian vault crossed 2,000 notes last month and the graph view turned into a gray hairball. Every node the same color, every edge the same weight, zero information. I knew there were clusters in there — projects, people, concepts, daily notes — but I couldn't see them.

The fix was color groups. Obsidian has supported them for years. What I didn't know, and what took me embarrassingly long to figure out, is that the color group query syntax is a tiny DSL with its own rules, and the graph.json file stores colors as RGB integers, not hex. Here's everything I wish someone had written down in one place.

Where the config lives

Color groups are stored in .obsidian/graph.json inside your vault. Open it and you'll find a colorGroups array that looks like this:

{
  "colorGroups": [
    {
      "query": "path:Projects/",
      "color": {
        "a": 1,
        "rgb": 14701138
      }
    }
  ]
}

That rgb: 14701138 is the part that stopped me cold the first time I tried to hand-edit this file. It's not a hex string. It's a decimal integer. To get there from a hex color, you do:

def hex_to_rgb_int(hex_color: str) -> int:
    """Convert '#e0460e' style hex to the integer Obsidian stores."""
    h = hex_color.lstrip('#')
    return int(h, 16)

hex_to_rgb_int('#e0460e')  # 14698510

And back the other way:

def rgb_int_to_hex(n: int) -> str:
    return f'#{n:06x}'

rgb_int_to_hex(14698510)  # '#e0460e'

That's it. The alpha channel (a) is always 1 for the visible groups. If you set it to 0, the group is hidden, which is occasionally useful.

The query syntax

The query field is where the real power lives. Obsidian's graph query language is the same one used in the search panel, which means it understands these prefixes:

• path: — matches a substring of the full path from the vault root
• file: — matches the file name only
• tag: — matches a tag anywhere in the note (frontmatter or inline)
• line: — matches text on any line in the body
• [field:value] — matches a frontmatter field

You can combine them with boolean operators:

tag:#project AND -path:Archive/

The minus sign negates. OR also works. Parentheses group. Quoted strings are matched literally.

The gotcha nobody tells you about

Path queries match substrings, not prefixes. path:Projects will match Archive/2023/Projects/old-stuff.md. If you want to anchor, use a trailing slash: path:Projects/. If you want to anchor more strictly, use a regex: path:/^Projects\//.

First-match-wins ordering

This is the rule I kept tripping over: color groups are evaluated top to bottom, and the first match wins. If a note has tag:#project and lives in path:Daily/, and your Daily group is above your Project group in the JSON array, the note gets the Daily color.

This matters more than you'd think. I spent twenty minutes debugging why my project notes were all showing up as "daily" before I realized the array order was backwards. The fix: put the most specific queries first, the most general queries last.

A working 13-group setup

Here's the color group block I'm running on a 2,000-note vault. It's the result of about six iterations. Feel free to steal it.

{
  "colorGroups": [
    {
      "query": "tag:#concept-hub",
      "color": { "a": 1, "rgb": 16766720 }
    },
    {
      "query": "path:People/",
      "color": { "a": 1, "rgb": 15158332 }
    },
    {
      "query": "path:Projects/Active/",
      "color": { "a": 1, "rgb": 3447003 }
    },
    {
      "query": "path:Projects/",
      "color": { "a": 1, "rgb": 2067276 }
    },
    {
      "query": "tag:#meeting",
      "color": { "a": 1, "rgb": 10181046 }
    },
    {
      "query": "path:Daily/ AND -tag:#review",
      "color": { "a": 1, "rgb": 9807270 }
    },
    {
      "query": "tag:#review",
      "color": { "a": 1, "rgb": 15105570 }
    },
    {
      "query": "path:Literature/",
      "color": { "a": 1, "rgb": 11027200 }
    },
    {
      "query": "path:Areas/",
      "color": { "a": 1, "rgb": 1146986 }
    },
    {
      "query": "tag:#idea",
      "color": { "a": 1, "rgb": 16753920 }
    },
    {
      "query": "path:Resources/",
      "color": { "a": 1, "rgb": 7419530 }
    },
    {
      "query": "path:Archive/",
      "color": { "a": 1, "rgb": 5263440 }
    },
    {
      "query": "-path:Templates/",
      "color": { "a": 1, "rgb": 12632256 }
    }
  ]
}

Notice the ordering strategy:

1. Concept hubs first — the 10 or so MOC-style notes that tie everything together get the brightest color (gold) so I can see them instantly.
2. People next — these are small in number but semantically important.
3. Active projects before all projects — subfolders beat parent folders.
4. Meetings before daily notes — because meeting notes live inside the Daily folder but deserve their own color.
5. Reviews after daily notes — a review is a daily note with a #review tag; I want reviews to pop separately.
6. Archive second-to-last — dimmed gray, so archived content fades into the background.
7. The catch-all at the end — -path:Templates/ colors everything that isn't a template with a neutral gray.

Generating this from Python

I maintain the color group config in a Python file because it's easier to review and diff. Here's the generator:

import json
from pathlib import Path

GROUPS = [
    ('tag:#concept-hub', '#ffd700'),
    ('path:People/', '#e74c3c'),
    ('path:Projects/Active/', '#3498db'),
    ('path:Projects/', '#1f8b4c'),
    ('tag:#meeting', '#9b59b6'),
    ('path:Daily/ AND -tag:#review', '#95a5a6'),
    ('tag:#review', '#e67e22'),
    ('path:Literature/', '#a83800'),
    ('path:Areas/', '#117a2a'),
    ('tag:#idea', '#ff8c00'),
    ('path:Resources/', '#71368a'),
    ('path:Archive/', '#505050'),
    ('-path:Templates/', '#c0c0c0'),
]

def hex_to_rgb_int(h: str) -> int:
    return int(h.lstrip('#'), 16)

def build_color_groups() -> list[dict]:
    return [
        {'query': q, 'color': {'a': 1, 'rgb': hex_to_rgb_int(c)}}
        for q, c in GROUPS
    ]

def apply(vault: Path):
    graph_json = vault / '.obsidian' / 'graph.json'
    data = json.loads(graph_json.read_text())
    data['colorGroups'] = build_color_groups()
    graph_json.write_text(json.dumps(data, indent=2))
    print(f"Wrote {len(GROUPS)} color groups")

if __name__ == '__main__':
    apply(Path.home() / 'Documents' / 'vault')

Run that after any query tweak and your vault lights up.

What it actually looks like

Before: 2,000 gray dots. I would open the graph view for three seconds, feel overwhelmed, close it.

After: ten bright gold concept hubs at the center, surrounded by blue project clusters, with gray daily-note chains radiating out and red people-nodes scattered through. The first time I rendered this I sat there for a minute just looking at it. I could see which projects had the most connections. I could see which people I'd been writing about most. I could see the archive as a dim cloud at the periphery.

The graph went from decoration to diagnostic tool.

The rule I'm sticking to

One query per semantic concept, ordered specific-to-general, catch-all at the end. That's the whole trick. If you find yourself writing a 14th group, ask whether one of the first 13 can absorb it. If your graph still looks noisy, the problem isn't color — it's that you have too many notes without tags or consistent paths, and no amount of coloring will fix that.

If you want to see the rest of the Obsidian automation I'm running (the daily note generator, the concept hub auto-builder, the backlink health checker), it's all at whoffagents.com.

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