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The Editor

The editor is the visual workspace where you build, run, and inspect Griptape Nodes workflows. It's a canvas: you drag nodes onto it, wire them together, and run the result. Everything else in the window — the header, the menu bar, the two sidebars — exists to support that canvas: naming and running your workflow, finding nodes to add, and inspecting what a node is doing once it runs.

This page is a tour of each region. If you're looking for a specific task instead, the Where to go next section links to focused guides for nodes, groups, running workflows, media editors, and library management.

The canvas

The canvas is where your workflow lives. Nodes are boxes with inputs and outputs; connections between them are the lines you draw from one node's output to another's input. Everything you build ends up here.

A few ways to move around:

  • Pan: hold Space and drag (this works even while your cursor is over a node), or drag with the middle mouse button.
  • Zoom: scroll or pinch, use the zoom slider in the top-left corner (if enabled in your settings), or hold Z and drag left/right for a Photoshop-style scrubby zoom.
  • Select: drag on empty canvas to draw a selection box around several nodes, or Shift-click individual nodes to add or remove them from the current selection.

A minimap in the corner (toggle it in your editor settings if it's hidden) shows the whole graph at a glance and lets you jump around by clicking or dragging inside it. The controls cluster in the bottom-left gives you zoom in/out/fit-view buttons and a Toggle Clean Mode button that hides the decorative Griptape logo watermark — useful when you're taking a screenshot of your own workflow.

Double-clicking empty canvas opens the Add Node menu at your cursor. See Working with Nodes for everything you can do with a node once it's placed, and Keyboard Shortcuts for the full list of canvas shortcuts.

The header

The header runs across the top of the window and is split into three clusters.

On the left, a sidebar-toggle button sits next to the menu bar, followed by your workflow's name. The name shows a trailing * whenever you have unsaved changes, and the file name (<workflow>.py) appears underneath once the workflow has been saved at least once. An unsaved, never-saved workflow shows just the in-progress name with no file name line.

In the center, the run controls:

Button What it does
Run Workflow Runs the entire workflow from its start.
Run To Selected Runs up through the single selected node.
Run From Selected Starts execution at the single selected node and runs forward.
Cancel Run Stops a workflow that's currently running.

Run To Selected and Run From Selected are only enabled when exactly one node is selected. See Running Workflows for what "runnable" means and how partial runs behave.

On the right, an engine picker (for switching which running engine the editor talks to), an error history dropdown, and a Publish Workflow button that opens the publish dialog.

The menu bar

The menu bar sits in the header's left cluster, next to the sidebar toggle. It has three menus.

File

Create, open, save, and manage the current workflow file:

  • New / Open... — start a new workflow or browse to an existing one.
  • Rename... — rename the workflow (disabled for Griptape-provided templates; use Save As to make an editable copy instead).
  • Save / Save As... / Save As New Version — Save As New Version writes a new versioned file (my_workflow_v002.py, and so on) instead of overwriting; it only appears once the workflow has been saved at least once.
  • AutoSave — toggle automatic saving on or off, with a shortcut into its settings.
  • Refresh Libraries — pick up library changes without restarting the engine.
  • Report Issue — file a bug report.
  • Exit — leave the editor.
  • Delete <workflow name> — permanently delete the current workflow file.

Manage

Jumps to the management surfaces for the resources a workflow depends on:

  • Model Management — models available to nodes that need them.
  • Library Management — install, update, and configure node libraries. See Libraries for the full guide.
  • Engine Management — the engines the editor can connect to.
  • Project Management — the projects available to switch between. See Managing Projects in the GUI.

Settings

Everything configurable, grouped under a Settings submenu (All Settings, Agent Settings, Editor Settings, Theme Settings, Engine Settings, File System, Libraries, Library Settings, MCP Servers, and API Keys & Secrets), plus three actions below it: Copy Path to Settings (copies the settings file's path to your clipboard), Show Settings Folder (opens it in Finder/Explorer/your file manager), and Reset Settings to Default.

The left sidebar

The left sidebar is where you find nodes and libraries to add to your workflow. A Favorites section sits above the tabs — star a node to pin it here so you don't have to hunt for it every time — followed by a search box that filters whichever tab is active.

Two tabs live below the search box:

  • Nodes — every node available to you, organized by category, from both built-in and installed libraries.
  • Libraries — the same nodes, organized by which library they come from instead of by category. This is a browsing view; to install, update, or remove a library itself, use Manage → Library Management (see Libraries).

Drag a node from either tab onto the canvas to add it to your workflow. Click the sidebar-toggle button in the header (or its shortcut) to collapse the sidebar down to a narrow icon rail, or close it entirely.

The right sidebar

The right sidebar holds a set of tabbed panels, titled Sidebar Panels. A dropdown next to its close button (the icon with three dots) lets you show or hide any panel — each entry shows an eye icon so you can see which panels are currently visible. Hiding a panel here doesn't discard anything; its tab returns the next time you re-enable it.

The four panels:

  • Chat — talk to an agent thread directly inside the editor, with a picker for model/provider and any MCP servers you've wired up.
  • Code — the workflow's generated Python, in a syntax-highlighted editor you can search and run from.
  • Logs — the execution log stream, filterable by severity (Debug, Info, Warning, Error, Critical) and searchable.
  • Properties — the parameters of whichever node (or nodes) you currently have selected on the canvas. This is usually where you'll spend most of your time once a workflow is built, since it's how you configure each node's inputs.

If the sidebar is closed, a floating button near the top-right corner of the canvas reopens it.

Where to go next