Graph editor on Linux

Imagine you just want to create a graph to represent some network topology so you can parse it and generate the configuration files accordingly. You probably want to do that in an editor because you want to quickly check different topologies. So no fancy diagram editor just nodes, edges, attributes, point and click interface which exports in a simple and clear dot format that’s it.

I’m afraid this doesn’t seem to exist. Most people will redirect you to yEd, which is a somewhat cumbersome java diagram editor (it takes more than ten seconds to start the thing). It cannot even export in the dot format, instead it saves in an overly verbose and messy GraphML format. Well, there are some other diagram editors which can export to the dot format but these tools are used to produce good looking visual content and the resulting dot file will be crowded with useless attributes and sometime invisible nodes.

It’s crazy one cannot find a such simple graph editor. Does anyone know one? Does anyone want to create one?  I see… a nice and clean GUI in Python/GtkBuilder which saves in dot and GraphML and can export the thing in various format with the “dot” command.

4 thoughts on “Graph editor on Linux

  1. lol.. totally agree. found this post when searching for one for about the 10th time.. of course there’s dia… another program which doesn’t cut it

  2. Agreeed! I use yEd but its support guy said it could not layout a graph in a way I needed, which is nothing complicated. I am willing to write layout algorithm for myself, but do not want to write another graphical graph editor on my own. I have been searching some generic, simple GUI for graphing, on and off. Today, I found your webpage, and one possibility [ http://bl.ocks.org/cjrd/6863459 Interactive tool for creating directed graphs using d3.js.] It exports as JSON, which is simple enough to write a little script to manipulate it.

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