Dear ROS community,
As I have been using ROS 2 behavior trees more and more, especially with Nav2, I found myself in a slightly awkward workflow.
For small changes or quick previews, opening Groot often felt heavier than what I needed. But once the behavior trees started growing, editing them directly in XML also became harder to reason about. I often just wanted a quick visual way to inspect the tree, tune a few attributes, move nodes around, and keep working.
Over the last couple of weeks I built a VS Code extension to help with exactly that workflow:
Nav2 BT Editor
It is a visual editor for BehaviorTree.CPP / Nav2 XML behavior trees inside VS Code. The focus is on small tuning changes, quick previews, and editing existing BT XML files without leaving the editor.
After using it myself quite a bit, and after showing it to a few colleagues who also found it useful in their workflow, I decided to open source and publish it.
Important note: this is only a preview/editor tool. It does not tick the tree, execute behavior trees, connect to ROS directly, or replace runtime validation in Nav2.
Some of the current functionality:
- Visualize Nav2 / BehaviorTree.CPP XML trees as an editable graph
- Edit node attributes and write changes back to XML
- Add nodes from imported TreeNodesModel definitions
- Import TreeNodesModel files from local files or URLs
- Import external behavior trees as reusable SubTree templates
- Add, delete, copy, cut, and paste nodes
- Drag and drop nodes to reorder or move them between valid parents
- Navigate SubTrees one tree at a time, or expand them inline
- Change a node to another compatible type
- Highlight the selected graph node in the XML editor
- Basic malformed XML detection for common cases that otherwise make the tree preview misleading
The extension is published on the VS Code Marketplace as:
Nav2 BT Editor
davidg-develop.vscode-nav2-bt-editor
GitHub repo:
I would be happy if people working with Nav2 behavior trees tried it out and gave feedback. In particular, I am interested in whether the editing workflow fits how others structure and tune their Nav2 trees, and whether there are common Nav2 / BehaviorTree.CPP patterns that should be better supported.
Happy coding!