Customizing Your KNIME Workspace

We all want to be able to configure the look and feel of our workspace and our workflows. Luckily, KNIME is an expansive sandbox that provides a lot of configuration and control over how things appear, though some of these configuration options can be tricky to find.

I’m going to cover how you make the Favorite Nodes section appear, how to set the default view for your workspace (grid visibility and connection styles) and adjust the prefix of new nodes placed on your workflow.

Favorite Nodes:

Enabling Favorite Nodes allows you to identify specific nodes as Personal Favorites and as you use KNIME you will also see growing lists of nodes you most frequently use and nodes you last used.

By default, the Favorite Nodes section is not shown in the workspace. To make things more complicated under the View menu you won’t see an option enable Favorite Nodes. 

To enable Favorite Nodes click View and then click Other. The Show View window pops up.

Click View then Click Other

In the filter text field type the word Favorite. This will filter the list down to show you Favorite Nodes. Select it and click Open. This adds Favorite Nodes to your workspace!

Now the best part! To add nodes to your Personal Favorite Nodes list open the Node Repository and Favorite Nodes and simply drag and drop those favorite nodes into your Personal Favorites List!

Workflow Editor:

You may notice when you first open KNIME that your workflow has a grid behind it and your nodes are connected with angular connections (not curved).

If you prefer to not see the grid, and you want curved connections you can always click on the wrench icon at the top of the workflow and make your adjustments. Unfortunately, as the settings indicate, these changes are isolated to the active workflow and not every workflow from here on.

In addition, you may not like the label prefix of Node 1,2….etc. for each new node you place in your workflow. Let’s make some changes!

To make the change global and apply to all workflows you create, select File and Preferences. In the search field type workflow and then select Workflow Editor from the filtered list.

Here we can clear the node prefix label and remove the word ‘Node’. If you wish, you can even change the label font size.

Now let's de-select Show Grid and select Curved Connections. From here we can adjust the line connection thickness between nodes in a range of 1-3. Click Apply and Close. These changes will now impact all workflows you create.

Now your node labels will be blank by default, you will not see the grid and node connections will be curved! I think it's fantastic that KNIME includes this level of configuration to really make your workspace feel like your own!

I hope this was informative! If you have questions or want to see something specific please let me know!

As always, download KNIME here and happy KNIME-ing!