I’m using Linux and Graphviz 14.0.1 (20251006.0113) (built myself).
which gvedit
gives nothing.
man gvedit
gives
No manual entry for gvedit
(I know that there’s the man page cmd/gvedit/gvedit.1)
./configure --help | grep -i gvedit
gives nothing.
find / -executable -type f -iname '*gvedit*' 2>/dev/null
gives nothing.
The man page:
GVEDIT(1) General Commands Manual GVEDIT(1)
1mNAME0m
gvedit - simple graph editor and viewer
SYNOPSIS0m
gvedit [ -sv? ] [ file2 ]
DESCRIPTION0m
gvedit provides a simple graph editor and viewer. It allows many graphs
to be viewed at the same time. The text of each graph is displayed in
its own text window.
The name of a Graphviz file can be specified on the command line. This
graph file will be automatically opened on start-up.
OPTIONS0m
The following options are supported:
-s By default, the layout algorithms that use initial positions
given by a node's pos attribute (currently, fdp and neato) as‐
sume the coordinates are in inches. Frequently, the input graph
has these in points, especially if the graph is output by a
Graphviz layout algorithm. This flag can be used to scale the
coordinates from points to inches.
-v Verbose mode.
-? Prints usage information and exit.
AUTHOR0m
Arif Bilgin <arif@research.att.com>
Emden R. Gansner <erg@research.att.com>
SEE ALSO0m
dot(1)
4 April 2011 GVEDIT(1)
which gvedit gives /home/myhome/bin/gvedit
@decision-making-mike It looks like the gvedit program was not installed. You said that you built Graphviz yourself. When you ran configure, a status summary of about 70 lines was printed at the end. Can you please post that summary here?
That was it. There is a line containing the string gvedit in configure’s output. If you don’t mind, I’ll restrict the output I saw to the “commands” section:
commands:
dot: Yes (always enabled)
neato: Yes (always enabled)
fdp: Yes (always enabled)
circo: Yes (always enabled)
twopi: Yes (always enabled)
gvpr: Yes (always enabled)
gvmap: Yes (always enabled)
smyrna: No (requires: gtk+ gtkglext glade gts glut)
gvedit: No (QtCore not available)
I don’t know why I didn’t think about configure’s output earlier.
Now that I knew (“then that I knew”?), I could install the packages that I had been lacking. Most probably it were qtbase5-dev and qtbase5-gles-dev. (It was trial and error what packages would work. The names and descriptions of those two, checked with apt show qtbase5-dev qtbase5-gles-dev, don’t mention they are related to the Qt Core module.) Then when I did
./configure
I got
commands:
(...)
gvedit: Yes
Then I did make and make install, and now
which gvedit
gives
/usr/local/bin/gvedit
and
man gvedit
shows the man page.
Right at the first run I see a potential bug. I have two windows, one with commands, and the other with the layout. When I do “Window” → “Tile”, they get tiled. But when I subsequently do “Graph” → “Layout” (or press F5), the window with the layout goes into the foreground, is taken out of its position to the left, and changes its size. This makes the window with commands hidden (because it went to the background). I don’t know about other resolutions, but in my 1024x768, if the window with the commands happened to be on the right, the windows now look like
and if it happened to be on the left, the windows now look like
To make the window with commands visible again, I need to do “Window” → “Tile” again. So, the expected behavior be that the window with the layout is not taken out of its position, thus doesn’t change its size, and the actual behavior is that it is taken out, and changes its size.
For future reference, the ci/ directory in the repository contains Docker files for various operating systems. You can consult these to figure out dependent packages to install.
If you’ve found a gvedit bug, please go ahead and report it.
Thank you for the Docker files. As for reporting bugs, I would do it directly, but I’m not on GitLab.
