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.