Main Help

Welcome to the JOSM Help system! An easy start is the Introduction. The How Tos deal with some use cases.

Interface

The Main Menu and its submenus File, Edit, View, Tools, Selection, Presets, Imagery, Windows, Audio and Help lead the way to all possible actions in JOSM. A search allows to find every menu item and every action. Both the Main Toolbar under the menu and the Edit Toolbar on the left side allow instant access to actions and data.

The Main Area is called Map View. It is for editing the map objects. It has a close relation to the panels in the Toggle Dialogs on the right side. The panels allow to view and to edit the tags of the selected objects.

The Status Bar informs about the drawing position, the highlighted object and the working mode. Not shown here are the dialogs for setting Preferences, for managing Changesets, for resolving Conflicts and the Relation Editor.

Concepts

The power of JOSM lays in its flexibility to allow every user to download, create, publish and share:

• Presets to tag faster while maintaining an unified tagging scheme on OSM,
• Styles to change the way the maps are painted,
• Plugin to extent JOSMs functionality far beyond the programs core and
• Keyboard shortcuts of his choice.

Past and Future

JOSM has grown with the ​Openstreetmap and can handle all of its ​Map Features. They even have some older pages about ​JOSM ​there.

The speed of growth was sometimes bigger than the speed of writing documentation, so you are invited to contribute to this help here on JOSM to keep it up to date and translated.