Tools > Merge Nodes

Keyboard shortcut: M

Merge the currently selected nodes into one node.

Note: there different activation steps for this tool, they covered at Select Move tool (you have to hold "Ctrl" while moving object).

Target position depends on last selection and advanced setting

Advanced Preferences

One of 3 modes can be set in the advanced preferences with the merge-nodes.mode key:

• merge-nodes.mode=0 - default and simple: last selected node will be used as position of resulting node
• merge-nodes.mode=1 - to average locations of all selected nodes
• merge-nodes.mode=2 - weighted average where nearby nodes have lower weight than remote

Before merge (initial state):

After merge with merge-nodes.mode=0 (latest selected node is important):

(one of 9 positions, depending on the last node in selection)

After merge with merge-nodes.mode=1 (without weight):

After merge with merge-nodes.mode=2 (weighted average):

Merge conflict

If user joins two nodes with same key, he will be prompted with dialogue to select one of 4+ desired values (in illustration below two points with tags note="3" and note="4" were merged):

• 3 - note=3 will be left
• 4 - note=4 will be left
• (more values will appear here) - (same as above)
• none - note= tag will be removed
• all - note=3;4 will be left (or note=3;4;5 or more values will be glued until 255 limitation in value will be reached)

Can't merge because way still in use

The nodes you merge may be part of ways. If you merge them these "parent" ways may loose one or more of their nodes. In some cases the number of nodes left in these ways may drop below 2. Ways with less than 2 nodes don't make sense and JOSM tries to delete them.

In some cases, though, a way to be deleted could still be in use, for instance, because a relation is referring to it. JOSM aborts merging nodes in these cases. Instead, it displays the following warning message:

Click on Abort Merging to close the dialog. The selected nodes are not merged.

See also

• Select Move
• Improve Way Accuracy - over time many mappers switch to this tools instead of manually selecting-and-moving each node
• #6696 - patch about merge-nodes.mode

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