What steps will reproduce the problem? 1. Make a big map/graph and put the nodes where you want them 2. Press Ctrl+Enter to add a new child node 3. Watch helplessly as all your carefully positioned nodes get automatically reorganized

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?

The nodes should stay where they were before pressing Ctrl+Enter, just like when adding a new child node by double-clicking a node with the mouse.

What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?

Semantik Version 0.8.4 Using KDE Development Platform 4.14.1

Kubuntu 14.10

This is intentional: where on the map do you want to position the newly inserted item?

by the way, the latest version is 0.9.4 not 0.8.4

Automatic reorganization removes all spatial information I have put into the graph. I would like it if I could opt out of the automatic reorganization.

Making matters worse, the automatic reorganization puts my nodes so close to one another that they obscure each other. The automatically organized graph is thus unreadable and of no use until I manually organize the nodes again.

Considering this, simply placing the new item directly on top of the active item, without invoking reogranizing, would be an improvement. It would probably be even better if the new node would appear at a fixed offset; for example a little bit down and to the right of the parent node. (And maybe down and to the left when adding a sibling node with Shift+Enter?)

The workaround is of course to add new items using the mouse. I am a keyboard person, so I'd like it if I could add nodes with the keyboard without losing information :)

Regarding version, I got the one I am using from my distribution's repository :)

By the way, I have tried selecting each of the three reorganization types in the configuration ("Fixed", "Force-based" and "Incremental"), but they all seem to yield the same result.

The items are positioned with the mouse in the first place. And then you want to use the keyboard... ?

Choosing a good position for the objects is just too hard, especially when adding more than one object. This is also why the other reorganization modes (incremental and force-based) are still disabled.

Overlapping objects is likely to be due to an old bug that was closed at some point. Open the example map (https://code.google.com/p/semantik/source/browse/example.sem) and reorganize it, items will not overlap (one has to use 0.9.4 though). Once again, do you best to use 0.9.4 because the older version have serious issues.

Yes; I want to add multiple items with the keyboard in one go before I switch mental modes and move my hands to use the mouse, with which I do the spatial organization. Is this so hard to believe?

Whether or not the automatic organization yields unreadable results is a red herring and I am sorry to have brought it up. The problem is that I have put effort into placing the items, and that effort is washed away by simply trying to add a new item.

Choosing a good position for the objects is just too hard

So; because it is hard to decide where to put one new item, you move all my items around? Note, again, this is not about automatically moving the items to bad positions, this is about automatically moving nodes at all. I would like the nodes to stay where I put them.

I would like to be able to manually position all my nodes. This use case is well supported if I add all new nodes with the mouse.

I would also like to be able to add new nodes with the keyboard while still being able to position all nodes manually. This is currently unsupported, right? Automatically choosing a good position for the new node does not enter into it; a bad position is perfectly acceptable. Moving around all my nodes is unfortunately not acceptable to me :)

I'll give the latest version a go later on :)

This is inconsistent. When I do not have a mouse, I do not want to perform any kind of item positioning when I add something onto the map.

We can add an option in the preferences to enable such a behaviour but you have to promise that you will switch to a more recent version.

Use this revision r679cf2ca49e9cc2bb1a8563ad532a44bfd36e029

Perfect. That's exactly what I needed :)

Have you tried it?

Yes, I am currently using revision 679cf2ca49e9cc2bb1a8563ad532a44bfd36e029 from git, and it's working like I want :)

Perfect :-)