DOKK / manpages / debian 12 / graphviz / dotty.1.en
DOTTY(1) General Commands Manual DOTTY(1)

dotty - A Customizable Graph Editor

dotty [ -V ] [ -lmmode ] [ -ellev ] [ file ]

dotty is a graph editor for the X Window System. It may be run as a standalone editor, or as a front end for applications that use graphs. It can control multiple windows viewing different graphs.

dotty is written on top of dot and lefty. lefty is a general-purpose programmable editor for technical pictures. It has an interpretive programming language similar to AWK and C. The user interface and graph editing operations of dotty are written as lefty functions. Programmer-defined graph operations may be loaded as well. Graph layouts are made by dot, which runs as a separate process that communicates with lefty through pipes.

If the input graph contains xdot attributes, dotty will use that to display the graph. Otherwise, it runs dot to obtain layout information.

The file name is optional. If present, the graph contained in that file is displayed in the dotty window.

Prints the version.
Sets the layout mode. The mode can be sync or async. The default is async.
Sets the mesage level. The lev can be 0 or 1. The default is 0.

The lefty parser does not accept anonymous graphs.

dot(1), lefty(1), lneato(1), xdot(3)
dotty user guide.