Converting Old Vithanco Documents to VGL

If you have diagrams from the original Vithanco Mac app — files ending in

.vithanco, .ibisVT, .tocVT or .cmapVT — vithanco2vgl turns them into VGL, the text format Vithanco reads today. Your originals are never modified.

Download vithanco2vgl — 4.5 MB.

Free, signed and notarised by Apple, so it runs without a security warning. It needs macOS 15 or later, and works on both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs.

Installing

Unzip it. You get a folder holding two items:

vithanco2vgl/
    vithanco2vgl                              the tool
    VithancoDataModel_VithancoDataModel.bundle  the old document format

Keep them together. The tool reads the old file format out of that bundle and will not start without it. Move the whole folder somewhere sensible and call the tool by its path, or put both items on your PATH.

Converting

Point it at a document to see the VGL:

vithanco2vgl "Why Vithanco.vithanco"

Point it at a folder to convert everything in it, writing each .vgl next to its original. Add -r to include subfolders:

vithanco2vgl -r ~/Documents/Diagrams

Other options: -v lists what each conversion had to change, --force overwrites .vgl files that already exist, and --inspect reports what a document contains — its notation, its node types, and how many nodes use each — without converting anything.

What comes across

Nodes, edges, labels, links, annotations, groups with their folded state and colour, icons, line widths and document metadata all carry over. Positions do not, and do not need to: neither format stores them, because both lay a diagram out from its structure.

The notation is read out of the document itself rather than guessed from the file extension, so IBIS, Concept Maps, Benefit Breakdown Structures, Decision Trees, Causal Loop Diagrams, Impact Maps and the Theory of Constraints notations all arrive as themselves. Documents saved by very early versions of the app, which recorded no notation identifier at all, are recognised by name.

What it tells you

Two notations are never quite the same, and where the conversion had to make a judgement it says so — in the terminal with -v, and as a comment at the top of the .vgl it writes. A node type with no counterpart today keeps its own definition in a vnotation block rather than being dropped. A necessary condition that the old app drew pointing one way and VGL draws the other is turned round, and counted. Nothing is discarded quietly.

If you defined your own notation in the old app, it comes across as a

vnotation block with its node types, colours and icons intact, so the diagram still reads the way you drew it.