Make the option to anchor/lock nodes and make them unaffected by global automatic layouts.

Question

The automatic layout features of yEd is awesome, but it is also makes maintaining your own structure to the graph a little difficult.

I suggest giving an "anchor this node" option in the context menu, which will make that node unmoved by automatic layout algorithms. (The user can still move anchored nodes just like normal nodes.)

This would allow the user to quickly put the important nodes to positions which communicate his idea the best, anchor them, and then use yEd to elegantly reposition the less-important details.

Happy to send in some diagrams illustrating this if it helps.

Btw, awesome stuff with yEd. Loving it to bits.

Answer 1

There is a specific layout algorithm for this task, it's called 'Partial (Selection Only)' in the Layout menu.

Some other algorithms have a similar setting, too, for example 'Scope' in Organic Layout, 'Act on Selection Only' in Circular Layout and 'Selected Element Incrementally' in Hierarchical Layout.

Comments

The "Selected Element Incrementally" acts much different from the other three, and the Hierarchical layout is the one I want. It seems to just relax the "use drawing as sketch" requirement for the selection, but still re-layout's the whole diagram. IMO Hierarchical routing still needs a selection-only feature. What I would *really* like though is the above feature request: a way to mark parts of the diagram as already-layed-out.