dotty

dotty [-V] [-f] [-lm mode] [files...]

dotty was an interactive graph viewer and editor for the DOT language, shipped with Graphviz. Unlike dot, which renders a static image, dotty opened a window in which a graph could be panned, zoomed, edited, and re-laid-out, with nodes and edges added or deleted by mouse.It was written not in C but in lefty, a small programmable graphics language that also came with Graphviz. lefty handled the window and the interaction, and shelled out to `dot` or `neato` for layout. That design made dotty highly scriptable, since its entire behaviour was source code you could edit, but it also tied it to a language nobody else used.This command no longer exists. lefty, and with it dotty and lneato, were disabled in the build system in September 2021, dropped from the packages published on graphviz.org in January 2022, and finally deleted from the repository. Current Graphviz releases do not contain any of them. The code remains in the project's git history for anyone who needs to build an old version.

FILES

DOT files to open.

Print the version and exit.

Load and reformat the graph even if it already has layout coordinates.

Set the layout mode: sync or async.

If a distribution still ships dotty, it is packaging an old Graphviz release. The command requires X11, cannot be built against current Graphviz sources, and receives no fixes.For interactive viewing, xdot is the usual replacement: it is actively maintained, reads the same DOT files, and offers pan, zoom, and click-to-navigate. For editing graphs by hand, general graph editors such as yEd or Gephi are far more capable than dotty ever was, and for a quick look, rendering to SVG with `dot -Tsvg` and opening the result in a browser costs nothing.

dotty came out of the original Graphviz work at AT&T Bell Labs and later AT&T Labs Research, in the early 1990s, when an interactive X11 viewer was the only convenient way to explore a large graph. It was written by Eleftherios Koutsofios on top of his lefty language.Its removal was unusually cautious even by Graphviz standards. The maintainers suspected lefty had been unused for years but, given how widely Graphviz is deployed, staged the removal across several years so that anyone still depending on it would have time to object. Almost nobody did.

dot(1), xdot(1), neato(1), graphviz(7)

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