Highlighting and Focused Layout

Click a classification or a connector type in the left panel and it lights up on the canvas while everything else dims back. Press Dark Energy while something's lit and the layout is built around it, so the lit part is laid out first and held still while the rest of the structure grows around it.

Why you'd use it

Highlighting is for seeing where something sits. Nothing is hidden, because hiding the rest would take away the very thing you're trying to see it against.

The focused layout is for when something's buried, such as a process of a dozen steps tangled into a structure of a few hundred nodes. Highlight it, press Dark Energy, and the steps come out as a clean run with everything else arranged around them.

Highlighting

1. Click a classification in the Left Panel. Its nodes stay bright, and everything else, connectors included, dims.
2. Or click a connector type. Its connectors stay bright, along with the nodes at each end of them.
3. Click more to add them. Classifications and connector types combine, so you see everything you've picked at once.
4. Click a lit one again to turn it off.

Lighting a classification dims every connector, even one running between two of its own nodes. That's deliberate, since "where are these?" is a different question from "how do they connect?", and lighting the connector types answers the second one.

Laying out around a highlight

1. Highlight what you want to focus on, as above.
2. Press Dark Energy (the alien in the bottom bar, or key 1). Hover over it first and it says how many highlighted nodes it'll lay out first.
3. The highlighted nodes are arranged on their own, then held in place while everything else spreads out around them.

It works in 2D and 3D. With nothing highlighted, Dark Energy is the ordinary spread, and if you select a few nodes first, only those are rearranged, as usual.

Branch Grouping

A related setting lives in the Forces popover (the atom in the bottom bar). Branch Grouping sets how strongly the branches leaving a node gather by classification. Turn it up and each node's branches sort into one arc per colour, while at zero the order is left to the connections alone. It pairs well with highlighting, because each kind of thing keeps to its own side.

Tips

• A route from Pathfinder lights up the same way and combines with a highlight, but it never changes the layout. Only a highlight from the left panel does that.
• Clicking a connector type does a different job when something's selected. With two nodes selected it connects them with that type, and with connectors selected it changes them to it. Click empty space first if you only want the highlight.
• Highlights aren't saved, so they're gone the next time you open the project.

What it doesn't do

• It never hides anything. Everything stays on the canvas, just dimmer.
• It doesn't filter what you send out. A screenshot shows the highlight as you see it, but share links, HTML files and Export for AI always carry the whole project.