The graph canvas

"Getting started" covered building a model one node and one relationship at a time. Real models grow past two nodes quickly, and organizing them (selecting several components at once, duplicating part of a model, keeping a flat model flat) is its own set of canvas skills. This page covers those, working on top of the bundled "Thermal Management" example rather than building from scratch again.

Open it from Examples in the top bar.

Selecting more than one node

A plain click selects one node and opens its editor, the same interaction "Getting started" already used. Holding Shift while clicking a second node adds it to the selection instead of replacing it, and doesn't open an editor for either. That's useful when you want to act on a group rather than inspect one member of it.

The status bar confirms it: "2 nodes selected" replaces the usual node/relationship count while a selection is active.

Copying and pasting a selection

With a multi-node selection active, the toolbar's copy and paste icons (or ⌘C/⌘V, Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V) duplicate the entire selected fragment: every relationship between the selected nodes comes with it, not just the nodes themselves.

A freshly pasted fragment starts out selected, which is what makes the next move convenient: drag it clear of the originals immediately, or press Delete/Backspace (or the toolbar's delete icon) to remove it without having to reselect anything. Both copy/paste and delete are undoable, like every other edit on the canvas.

Selecting with a rectangle

Shift-clicking works well for two or three nodes; for more, switch to the Rectangle select tool and drag a box around the ones you want. Every node fully enclosed by the rectangle gets selected, without opening an editor for any of them. This is a selection gesture, not an inspection one.

Locking the camera to a 2D plane

Most models don't actually need three dimensions of camera freedom to edit comfortably. A lot of real systems are conceptually flat. The lock-to-2D control (next to the selection tools) snaps the camera to the nearest orthogonal view (front, top or side) and disables rotation, leaving only pan and zoom.

New nodes and pasted fragments respect the lock too, landing in the same plane instead of drifting onto a third axis you can no longer see clearly. Click the same control again to unlock and return to free orbiting.

The other selection tools

Two more tools live next to Rectangle select and are worth knowing about even without a dedicated screenshot: Move and Rotate constrain a drag to one precise axis at a time, instead of the free 3D drag "Getting started" used. That's useful once a model is dense enough that a free drag risks landing somewhere unintended. Scale works the same way, and holding Shift while scaling applies it to all axes uniformly instead of one.

Where to go from here

With more than a couple of nodes on the canvas, the natural next step is subsystems (collapsing a selected group into a single navigable unit) and edge groups, for bundling several relationships between the same pair of nodes. Both build directly on the selection skills from this page.