GC(1)

💖 GC(1) — like, the manual page for smyrna, bestie 💖

okay so real talk: this page lives in the General Commands Manual section of your system, and honestly? it's a whole vibe. it's giving "interactive graph viewer" and we're gonna walk through every single bit of it together, no skips, no shortcuts. 🦋

---

✨ NAME ✨

smyrna — interactive graph viewer 👑

---

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

smyrna [ -v? ] [ file ]

that's it. that's the whole entrance. short, sweet, main character energy.

---

💅 DESCRIPTION 💅

so smyrna is a viewer for graphs in the DOT format. and not just any viewer — it's especially designed to handle large graphs, which is lowkey the flex here. it lets you do both flat and topological fisheye views. 🔥

here's the thing though: it assumes the input graph has position information associated with all nodes. like, it's not out here guessing where your nodes go. using the Graphviz convention, a node's position comes from its pos attribute, which is 2 or 3 floating point numbers separated by commas. nodes get drawn as points, edges get drawn as line segments. that's the whole look. ✨

if smyrna detects that the file contains xdot attributes, it will use that information when drawing nodes and edges. cute of it, honestly.

now the fun part — smyrna supports:

• panning and zooming 🔍
• node and edge selection
• setting and retrieving node and edge attributes, especially colors 🎨
• node movement

the Smyrna Settings dialogue box — which you'll find under the Edit pull-down menu — gives you so many choices for tailoring the graph view. and what's in there? let me list it:

• whether or not nodes/edges are drawn
• what labels are associated with nodes/edges
• node size
• transparency settings for nodes/edges
• parameters associated with the topological fisheye view

for the purposes of exploratory data analysis, smyrna provides access to the gvpr library. this lets you arbitrarily query, filter or manipulate a graph. and when you're filtering or manipulating, you get a choice: perform the changes directly on the input graph, or create a new version with the changes. your call, bestie. 💜

---

🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

the following options are supported:

• -v — verbose mode. it's giving chatty. 🗣️
• -? — print usage information. when you're lost, ask. 🙈

by default, gc returns the number of nodes and edges.

(yes, it says gc in the original, and yes, we are keeping it exactly like that. not our typo to fix. 💀)

---

🌈 OPERANDS 🌈

the following operand is supported:

• file — name of file containing a graph in DOT format. and if you don't specify a file operand? no worries, you can just use the File pull-down menu to select a file to be opened. 🫶

---

⭐ EXIT STATUS ⭐

the following exit values are returned:

• 0 — successful completion. slay. we ate. 💅
• 1 — if no No appropriate OpenGL-capable visual found, or if the default attributes template graph file or the default attributes widget graph file could not be read. 😭

---

🧚 FILES 🧚

smyrna relies on numerous support files. these are usually installed in the "share/graphviz/smyrna" directory below the installation root. the principal files are:

• template.dot — a file in DOT format specifying the default smyrna settings. in particular, these are used to initialize the settings of the Smyrna Settings dialogue box.
• mouse_actions.txt — a text file specifying the mapping of concrete mouse and keyboard events with smyrna actions such as panning and selecting. 🖱️
• attr_widgets.dot — a file in DOT format specifying the bindings between GUI widgets and smyrna parameters.

---

💜 ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES 💜

• SMYRNA_PATH — allows a user to override the built-in path to the directory containing all of smyrna's files described above. so like, if you wanna keep your stuff somewhere else, go off. 🌟

---

🫶 AUTHOR 🫶

• Arif Bilgin <arif@research.att.com>
• Emden R. Gansner <erg@research.att.com>

legends, honestly. icons. 👑

---

🔥 SEE ALSO 🔥

• gvpr(1)
• libcgraph(3)
• "Smyrna Tutorial and Reference Manual"

---

and that's the whole page, bestie!! 💖 this version of GC(1) comes to you from the General Commands Manual, dated 9 December 2009 — a vintage era, a classic, we stan. now go forth and view those graphs. 🦋✨💅