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Auto layout rearranges every node on the board at once, connected chains flow left-to-right in the order they connect, and anything not wired to anything else packs into a tidy grid alongside them. It never changes what’s connected to what; it only moves nodes.

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Run it

Click Auto layout in the left toolbar, or press ⇧ O, to lay out the whole canvas. To tidy just part of the board instead, select a frame or a multi-selection of nodes and click Auto layout in the floating selection action bar: only the selected nodes move.

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When to use it

Reach for it after a burst of node creation. A storyboard that fanned out into a dozen scene nodes, an AI assistant run that dropped several generations onto the canvas, or any point where new nodes have piled up overlapping or scattered. Auto layout turns that into a readable graph in one step, instead of dragging nodes into place by hand.

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How it arranges things

  • Connected nodes: any chain of nodes wired together lays out left-to-right, sources on the left and their dependents to the right, so you can read a pipeline the way you’d read a diagram.
  • Loose nodes: anything with no connections packs into a compact grid rather than being scattered.
  • Frames: a grouped frame moves as a single rigid block; its children keep their existing arrangement inside it and aren’t re-laid-out individually.
Everything is packed non-overlapping, so a single pass produces a clean board without a second cleanup step.

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From the AI assistant

The AI assistant can trigger the same layout as an arrange action. Useful after it builds out several connected nodes for you, so the result lands tidy instead of stacked. You can also ask it to arrange only a specific selection of nodes rather than the whole board.

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From the API

The Flowy MCP server exposes a layout_canvas tool for automations built outside the app: point it at a project, and it lays out every node in a left-to-right layered arrangement following the connections between them, or top-to-bottom, if you ask for the vertical direction instead.
Last modified on August 29, 2026