yEd Q&A - Recent questions and answers in Feature Requests

Answered: Support for Sequence diagrams in yEd

Sun, 19 Oct 2025 12:59:42 +0000

Chiming in to revive this request some 13 years later.

It is exceedingly difficult to draw a sequence diagram. The blocks must be manually resized, and the message arrows need to be dragged manually, both endpoints. If I resize an activation element to make room for more messages, the incident ends of the existing message arrows get moved around and I must then manually readjust them in order for the message arrows to become horizontal again.

The diagrams look sloppy because there aren't set points on the activation nodes on which to attach the messages.

Summary of features:

P1 Activation nodes with many snap points along each vertical edge of the node.
P1 The positions of the snap points remain fixed relative to the top under resize.
P2 Unattached lifeline edges.
P2 Node + lifeline combo for components.

Answered: Ascii Art export

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 17:27:51 +0000

I would like this too.

Answered: Custom Properties are not preserved?

Mon, 08 Sep 2025 09:04:01 +0000

yEd supports (de-)serializing custom properties only with its GraphML file format.

All other graph exchange formats in yEd (i.e.YGF, GML, XGML, and TGF) are legacy formats that are not updated with improvements anymore. This has been the case for a very long time (I think well over ten years).

This leaves you the following options:

Open your XGML files in yEd, manually add your custom properties (see "Edit" -> "Manage Custom Properties"), save your diagram to GraphML, and work with GraphML from then on.
Create an XSLT stylesheet that transforms your XGML documents into GraphML documents and use yEd's support for "XML + XSL" to open your XGML files through your stylesheet. If your stylesheet properly reproduces your custom properties in the resulting GraphML document, your custom properties will be available in yEd. If you want to edit the resulting diagram (especially custom property values), you will have to save your diagram in GraphML format.
Use yEd as an XGML viewer application only.

That said, I do not understand what you mean by "having a .cnfg is not really useful and should not be needed for such a simple process". yEd does not use that file name extension. (yEd offers the possibility to export properties mapper configurations to *.cnfx files, but these files do not store any graph information at all.)

Answered: Problem with virtual objects in yEd Live for Neo4j

Fri, 29 Aug 2025 15:26:51 +0000

This forum is for yEd questions only. For questions or feedback regarding any other yWorks products, please use the corresponding feedback submission forms. In the case of Data Explorer for Neo4j see the "Feedback" entry in the main application (aka "hamburger") menu.

Answered: providing "modification date" attribute for each node element

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 10:29:55 +0000

There is no modification date attribute in yEd.

The only workaround I can think of is adding a custom property for this purpose (see "Edit" -> "Manage Custom Properties") and manually update the corresponding property value whenever you change something about a node.

Align Nodes Menu Items On Toolbar

Fri, 09 May 2025 10:21:51 +0000

Can we get these menu items on the toolbar as well? I can never remember all the keyboard shortcuts and it's annoying to have to go into the menu every time.

Edit Label On Create Group

Fri, 09 May 2025 10:16:04 +0000

Most of the time, when I drag a node onto a graph, I don't need to edit it's label.

But every time I create a group, I DO need to edit it's label.

At the moment, these two are linked - a single checkbox for "Edit Label On Create Node" in Preferences.

Can you separate them out into groups and nodes please?

Label Icon Fit To Dimensions Of Label

Wed, 07 May 2025 16:01:05 +0000

At the moment we have to set a fixed size for icons inside a label. I'd love to be able to have it just use the dimensions of the label itself, so if the label gets longer, the icon gets longer too.

The use case is using the icon to put a fancy background shape/frame around the label rather than just a rectangle.

It would even better if it would actually resize vector shapes properly rather than just stretch them, too (at the moment if you do Convert To Label on a shape node, then go into the label's icon properties and change the size, it stretches it, meaning the border changes width and radiuses become elliptic etc. There are numerous reasons why having to do Convert To Node -> resize manually -> Convert To Label again is irritating and a bad workaround).

Answered: PDF export dialog does not appear in yED

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 11:41:15 +0000

In the PDF Export settings, go to tab "PDF":

Change "Text Rendering Policy" from "Vectorized Text" to "Plain Text with Embedded Fonts":

Please add zoom + and - hotkeys without numpad

Thu, 09 Jan 2025 10:28:09 +0000

Many keyboards don't have numpads, especially on laptops. Please expand the Numpad + and Numpad - shortcut / hotkeys for zooming to also include basic plus (+) and minus (-) keys outside the numpad.

Can I define anchor points in custom symbols?

Fri, 03 Jan 2025 12:54:22 +0000

I created a custom symbol for yEd with Inkscape. It's a very simple symbol, the time event symbol from UML Activity diagrams.

What happens is that, whenever I use it as a node and try to connect it to an edge, the edge always snaps to the exact centre of the symbol. This looks confusing when the edge is coming in vertically.

Is there a way to define a custom symbol where there are snapping points where I want them? Either in yEd itself, or while drawing the symbol? I could imagine putting a tiny (or invisible) dot where I want to have the snap happen, if this would work.

I saw that this has been asked as a question before, https://yed.yworks.com/support/qa/5151/how-specify-additional-connection-nodes-for-custom-shapes?show=5151#q5151. But doing it manually every time I use my symbol is tedious. So I'm adding this now as a feature request.

Is it possible to create animated line connecting the graph nodes? If not can this feature be added?

Tue, 22 Oct 2024 14:42:36 +0000

To create more engaging charts it is useful to create animated connections between nodes.

Could it be made possible to have arrows/edges in multiple colors?

Sun, 15 Sep 2024 16:21:48 +0000

I'm working on a huge sociogram with this software (about 140 nodes), but unfortunately it forces me to dramatically oversimplify the often one-sided dynamics I need to include for this project.

I know this is a bit of a long shot to be asking for, but if you guys would be so kind as to include something like that if you make another update I wouldn't even begin to describe how grateful I'd be. It'd also be nice to see if I can just edit the size of the arrows entirely so they're all visible beyond just thin black lines when I'm zoomed to fit everything on one screen.

Answered: Center text the elegant way in SVG export

Fri, 21 Jun 2024 17:58:34 +0000

Unfortunately, I do not think it is possible to use SVG-specific techniques like text-anchor="middle" when exporting a diagram to SVG.

Conceptually, yEd's SVG exports works by redirecting the drawing commands that are used to display a diagram on screen to a converter that creates corresponding SVG elements. The set of drawing commands for rendering on screen does not include a center command - all it offers is a command to draw text at a specific location. As a result, the converter cannot know that the original intention was to "center text".

For completeness sake, I would like to add that the converter mentioned above is the Apache Batik SVG toolkit - i.e. this is a third-party library.

Answered: Impulse Diagram

Wed, 05 Jun 2024 14:32:27 +0000

yEd is a multi-purpose diagram editor for node-link diagrams. This allows the creation of different types of diagrams, e.g. by adding custom node visualizations/icons.

I'm not entirely sure what kind of diagrams you mean by "Impulse Diagram". Looking through Google results, there are quite different understandings of the term.

Anyhow, there is no plugin or mode dedicated to the creation of certain types of diagrams that you could enable.

Answered: Add a dark mode

Tue, 02 Apr 2024 09:15:16 +0000

Chances are high that yEd will never receive a dark mode. If that is an important feature for you, try yEd Live.

Answered: Support for Markdown in Label's text formatting

Tue, 26 Mar 2024 11:40:33 +0000

+1

(as separate post, since upvoting works only for logged-in users, and it's not possible anymore to register)

Answered: Can I search a pallete for an icon?

Fri, 22 Mar 2024 15:55:19 +0000

Unfortunately, yEd does not offer a way to search in its palette.

Unhelpful Family Tree error

Fri, 15 Mar 2024 20:27:09 +0000

When routing a family tree you may receive the Wrong Graph Structure Error.

To understand why this is unhelpful imagine creating a family tree like this:

Help > Example Graphs > Layout > familytree.graphmlz

Then try routing the example.

Layout > Family Tree

That will generate the error if you have previously chosen any colours in the routing dialogue that differ from the colours in the example. It is especially unhelpful as it suggests that a good example is the graph it has just failed to route.

The easiest way to fix this is to explain that the colours in the dialogue need to correspond to the graph.

Keep internal positions the same when an element is untouched

Thu, 29 Feb 2024 11:34:08 +0000

To improve element alignment and save space, we cut all decimal places from a graphML file from all x,y,width and height attributes. However as soon as we load this file in yEd, it will for example change all occurrences of `x=5.0` to `x=4.9998989889798798732948729384734` with an absurd number of decimal places. This happens even if the element is never moved. Please keep positions of unmoved elements the same and it would also be nice if the decimal places would be limited to a reasonable amount.

Answered: Is it possible to save the layout settings for each graph?

Fri, 23 Feb 2024 15:58:19 +0000

Supporting your question as a user loving this progi.

Complex graphs and all by specific layout configurations - and it is hard to remember all the details needed to re-run the same Layout again.

It would be great to get 'any hint' from yED about the used Layout-Configuration on the graph.

have a nice day and thanks for any Hint ...
Michael

Answered: Palette SysML

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 09:39:43 +0000

Yes please

Answered: Size of the palette window

Fri, 06 Oct 2023 14:10:41 +0000

No, unfortunately yEd does not offer a way to increase the size of the palette items.

enhanced external hyperlinks

Sat, 16 Sep 2023 13:14:25 +0000

In the yED editor, I can insert a hyperlink for any element by the following sequence:

1. open the element's properties
2. open the properties' data tab
3. insert path into URL field (or using the browse icon)

When I insert the path of a local file (on Windows it would start like e.g. "D:\folder\...\file.pdf"), this file gets opened as soon as I press <F8> on that selected element. This is nice, as it also works for hyperlinks into the WEB (using the prefix "HTTPS://...").

As it is the case with many applications, links might be evaluated based on the "protocol" prefix in a more general way. So, not only "HTTPS" or "HTTP" leads to opening the respective file within the standard browser, but any other standard application might be opened like this. For example, when I use the mindmapping application "Freeplane", I would be able to insert the following link which would lead to opening a specific node within the Freeplane application:

freeplane://C:/test/folder/mindmap.mm#ID_1230842422

By this mechanism, it would even be possible to jump directly to a yED element located within another yED file (if this was implemented in yED).

Would such an extended hyperlink feature be possible to implement in yED? If the yED editor was open source,, I could even try to implement it myself ;-) .

Answered: Default: fonts installed but impossible to select

Mon, 31 Jul 2023 15:16:56 +0000

Unfortunately, I do not think there is much we can do about this problem. yEd exposes all the fonts that are available to the Java virtual machine at runtime.

Answered: Layers (implemented as Groups) are not respected in SVG output

Fri, 12 May 2023 18:17:27 +0000

Have I got this wrong and is there perhaps some setting somewhere to enable this that I have missed?

No, you did not get anything wrong. yEd does not provide an option to export "layered" SVG documents.

There is a long-standing feature request for Layers (similar Dia or Visio layer). It has some (cumbersome) suggestions for simulating layers in yEd.

Answered: Export the group nodes in pdf

Fri, 05 May 2023 11:55:03 +0000

All PDF viewer applications I know of support "zooming".

Are you actually asking if it is possible to enter a closed group node to show its contents in a PDF viewer application?
Unfortunately, that is not possible.

i would like to export the structure view.

Fri, 24 Feb 2023 14:34:02 +0000

Import icons and automatically use file names as tooltips

Tue, 20 Dec 2022 17:24:06 +0000

When I import icon sets such as Azure, Kubernetes, AWS etc, the file names usually contain the meaning of the icon. For example: Azure's network folder has a file called 10064-icon-service-DNS-Zones.svg, which I understand to be the DNS Zone icon. But when I import these into yEd, the icons appear ok but there is no explanation as to what the name of the icon file is, making it extremely difficult to make use of them correctly. I have to use the original directory containing the icons as a look-up to visually compare them, which is dreadfully tedious.

Please add a feature that when icons are imported that tooltips are automatically created based on the original icon file names.

Add keyboard shortcuts for Raise/Lower Selection

Fri, 09 Dec 2022 20:11:39 +0000

For quickly fixing the z-order of overlapping nodes, it would be nice to have keyboard shortcuts for Raise/Lower Selection menu entries.

One option is to use Home and End keys to do that. It is consistent with how Inkscape lets reorder objects.

Here is a patch file that makes it work:

--- DocumentsUi.properties.old 2021-03-15 21:15:26.000000000 +0200
+++ DocumentsUi.properties 2022-12-09 20:11:45.000000000 +0200
@@ -195,19 +195,19 @@
history.mnemonic=
history.smallIcon=16:com/yworks/yfx/resource/svg/recent.svg
history.tooltip=Recent files

LowerSelectionAction.name=Lower Selection
LowerSelectionAction.mnemonic=
-LowerSelectionAction.accelerator=
+LowerSelectionAction.accelerator=\!END
LowerSelectionAction.smallIcon=16:com/yworks/yfx/resource/svg/lower_selection.svg
LowerSelectionAction.tooltip=Display selected elements behind all other elements

RaiseSelectionAction.name=Raise Selection
RaiseSelectionAction.mnemonic=
-RaiseSelectionAction.accelerator=
+RaiseSelectionAction.accelerator=\!HOME
RaiseSelectionAction.smallIcon=16:com/yworks/yfx/resource/svg/raise_selection.svg
RaiseSelectionAction.tooltip=Display selected elements on top of all other elements

#MimeType automatic
MimeType.Automatic.description=Automatic

Answered: auto connections

Wed, 05 Oct 2022 09:34:33 +0000

I have added your suggestion to our list of possible improvements for yEd. Due to the tremendous size of that list I cannot make any promises when or even if we will be able to include your suggested feature.

Answered: An 'Apply' button on all layout dialog boxes

Wed, 07 Sep 2022 15:39:09 +0000

Dock the layout settings dialog of the algorithm you are testing to use its tabular user interface.

Dialog user interface:

Tabular user interface:

The "Play" button in the tabular user interface is "Apply".

Store layout configuration inside diagram files

Mon, 05 Sep 2022 18:26:10 +0000

It would be useful to have the option to store layout configurations either system wide (which is the the current state) or inside diagram files.

Answered: Quckly hide (and show again) by means other than changing color

Thu, 25 Aug 2022 12:50:57 +0000

I would like to be able to hide groups or items also. My use case is to export portions of the the diagram. As there is no option to export only selected items (visible only).

Answered: Elements - Font size

Tue, 23 Aug 2022 09:29:41 +0000

Since the most useful default size will probably very much depend on the actual data that is displayed in a BPMN diagram, I think the most sensible solution is to create a user-defined palette section with templates that match your requirements:

Create a user-defined palette section (see "Edit" -> "Manage Palette").
Drag a BPMN task activity from the default BPMN palette into an editor tab.
Adjust the size (and every other property) of the activity to meet your requirements.
Right-click the activity to open its context menu and choose "Add to Palette".
Use the custom template when creating new activities.

The above approach should work fairly well, if you need to adjust only a few templates. If you want to adjust (almost) all templates in a given palette section, I propose the following approach:

Right-click the header of the BPMN palette section (or whatever section contains the templates you want to adjust) to open its context menu and choose "Convert to Document".
Adjust all the templates in the new editor tab to meet your requirements.
Create a new user-defined palette section, but be sure to choose "Adopt from Document" to automatically populate the new section with all the elements from the currently active editor tab.

Add encrypt/password to files yed

Tue, 14 Jun 2022 12:10:59 +0000

i would suggest adding encryption/"save with password" option for yed files

Answered: Support non-scaling-stroke attribute in newer SVG standard?

Fri, 20 May 2022 12:40:13 +0000

yEd uses the Apache Batik library for all things SVG. As far as I know, Batik does not support the non-scaling-stroke vector effect.

Zoom in Neighborhood

Thu, 05 May 2022 15:10:02 +0000

The neighbourhood feature is one of my favourite features and honestly sets yEd apart from any of the other graph editors I've tried.

This feature would be so much better if it allowed for zooming in/out along with horizontal and vertical scroll bars, similar to how the main navigation window works, and if it could use the real-estate of the window better that would make it even better.
Here is a screenshot of an important node in my graph, but there are so many child nodes that the text doesn't even render.

Answered: Make labels rich text

Fri, 29 Apr 2022 10:01:04 +0000

yEd supports formatting text using HTML markup. Please see How can I achieve different text stylings within one label? for more information.

Answered: Multi condition property mapping

Thu, 07 Apr 2022 16:07:59 +0000

Unfortunately, this is currently not supported.

The best you can do is using yEd's "Select Elements" tool to select all edges that satisfy the first criterion and then run "Select Elements" again for the second criterion but with "Act On Current Selection Only". After the second run, only the edges that satisfy both criteria are selected and you can change their format.

Restoring basic mouse functions in Full Screen view?

Thu, 07 Apr 2022 04:35:03 +0000

Hey guys,

yEd is great! The only thing I miss is the ability to adjust the graph in Full Screen view.

I was surprised to find that, unlike every other graphics program I've used, Full Screen in yEd just shows a picture of the current graph, without the ability to change it.

The reason I—and most other users, I assume—enter Full Screen view is to see the entire graph as closely as possible. That's also when it'd be the easiest to make changes that affect the whole graph's layout and balance.

I'm not talking about anything fancy... Obviously, with the property boxes and other features hidden, this would be limited to mouse operations: moving and resizing nodes, moving edges, editing labels. (Keyboard shortcuts related to hidden features would also be disabled.) This would be tremendously useful, IMHO.

Programmatically, would it really be that hard? Wouldn't yEd's functionality be pretty much the same, just without access to the hidden objects (which seems automatic, right)? I assume that when you implemented Full View, you actually had to turn off the normal mouse functionality... Maybe you could just turn it back on?

Thanks for considering this!

Answered: Select Elements > Nodes > "Group Nodes" not working

Mon, 21 Feb 2022 10:58:06 +0000

If edges get selected instead of nodes, the "Use These Criteria" option on tab "Edges" is enabled. You need to disable this option on all tabs, then enable the option on tab "Nodes" only.

Display enclosing group when viewing a group

Mon, 10 Jan 2022 20:57:15 +0000

When used double-clicks inside a node, the view switches to the node contents.

However, there is no visual display of the enclosing group.

It would be useful to let the user decide, using preferences or a graphical command, if the enclosing group shape and its label should be visible in the view.

Answered: copy selection as svg

Tue, 14 Dec 2021 09:12:04 +0000

yEd already supports this feature. After selecting some elements, right-click to open the selection context menu and choose "Copy to System Clipboard".

Answered: Export to Mermaid format

Mon, 06 Dec 2021 11:50:36 +0000

This would be a nice functionality to have!

Why does the yed graph editor not have an autosave feature?

Thu, 18 Nov 2021 17:27:54 +0000

Its such a basic thing that keeps me from using the software.

Answered: Faster Format editing (with copy-paste and last-selected-as-default)

Thu, 18 Nov 2021 11:17:24 +0000

PLEASE make this a thing! This is a basic and fundamental feature that any kind of editing-ish program has. The format, etc. has to be the same if you wanna copy it.

User interface : Navigation using edges

Fri, 05 Nov 2021 15:00:40 +0000

To facilitate navigation in large diagrams, implement for edges new right-click items to navigate to edge source or edge destination.

Find : persistency on the tab selection

Thu, 28 Oct 2021 16:25:04 +0000

When user invokes the "Find" dialog box ( e.g. using Ctrl-F ), several tabs can be selected, and the "General" tal is presented by default.

Let's say user chooses the "Nodes" tab and performs a search, and closes the dialog with the OK button.

A successive invocation of the "Find" dialog box is presenting again the "General" tab.

Desired behavior : It should be possible to have successive invocations of the find command remembering the last used tab.

In the example above, a successive invocation of the "Find" dialog box would present the "Nodes" tab.

Structure view search box : keep field to be searched persistent

Mon, 25 Oct 2021 19:55:05 +0000

In the structure view search box, when user loads a file, for example reloading an Excel import,

the text to be searched is cleared and the field to be searched resets to "text". I would prefer that the field to be searched stays invariant.

For example,

In the diagram structural view, search the Node ID field by changing the drop-down list from "Text" to "Node ID".
Reload the diagram
In the diagram structural view, search the Node ID field without having to change the field again from "Text" to "Node ID".