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Show HN: Markwhen: Markdown for Timelines (markwhen.com)
295 points by koch 9 hours ago | hide | past | favorite | 36 comments





Creator here - glad to see people like markwhen!

Been working on markwhen for a few years now, originally inspired by cheeaun's life timeline that another commenter posted about.

At this point markwhen is available as a VS Code extension, Obsidian plugin, CLI tool, and web editor in Meridiem.

Some recent markwhen developments:

- Dial, a fork of bolt.new (Stackblitz's very cool tool that leverages AI to help quickly scaffold web projects): an in-browser editor that lets you edit existing markwhen visualizations like the timeline or calendar or make your own. I just released that yesterday so it's still rough but I have big plans for it (it's one of the visualizations in meridiem)

- Event properties: each entry can have it's own "frontmatter" in the form of `key: value` pairs. I wanted this as I'm aiming for more iCal interoperability in the future, so each event could theoretically have things like "attendees" or google calendar ids or other metadata. This was released in the last month or two.

- remark.ing: this one isn't ready yet by any means but it's like a twitter/bluesky/mastodon-esque aggregated blog site. So you write markwhen and each entry is a post. In this way "scheduling" a post is just writing a future date next to it, and you have all your blog in one file. This one is a major WIP


I used Markwhen recently to make an interactive Gantt chart for a proposal to a collaborator and it went swimmingly. (We got the gig!) So, thank you!

For the record, I used the Obsidian plugin to develop, then deployed as static HTML.


I skimmed the documentation and didn't see any reference as to whether Markwhen supports dependencies? I.e. MSProject-style make one event dependent on another task ending or starting.

Did you need/use that functionality?


https://docs.markwhen.com/syntax/dates-and-ranges.html#relat...

It doesn't look at task completion but you can base events on other events


Sorry if this is a dumb Q but what took that from Markwhen/down to HTML?

Not a dumb question! Markwhen has a CLI: https://docs.markwhen.com/cli that I used.

Oh I missed the rendering capability. Thanks for the link!

What is the difference between the free and the monthly subscription tier?

Great to see this again. Amazing how this tool expanded so much over the years!

This is neat! It reminded me of this project by cheeaun that enables one to create a visual timeline based on a simple texted based format. The purpose was to plot one's life events in a visual way.

https://github.com/cheeaun/life

Sample file (from the repository):

    @USERNAME's life
    ===============

    - 24/02/1955 Born
    - ~1968 Summer job
    - 03/1976 Built a computer
    - 01/04/1976 Started a company
    - 04/1976-2011 Whole bunch of interesting events

Be careful.

Gruber (who has trademark in “Markdown”), appears to not like people using his trademark name.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-commo...


Not only is this a different name, but that was an attempt to essentially expropriate Markdown. This is nothing even close to that.

I searched for a trademark for „Markdown“, but I didn’t find any. Can you show me the trademark?

Wow … John Gruber was also very upset, … , that the word Markdown was not capitalized throughout the spec.

This has a different name.

Does this work at all for fantasy timelines?

Trying to build a timeline like this:

title: History of the World

0: Foo Calendar's civilization founding.

124: Invention of the Foo Calendar

220: Founding of Bar

1310: Invention of GlooblyGock

5621: Demon invasion.

Edit: After trying it don't think it works for this usecase.


Seems not right for the comments here to be empty but I don't have much to say other than this looks incredibly nice. Hope I have an excuse to use it at some point.

Thanks for sharing!


two years ago, this post got almost 400 points! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31810876

seconded.

This looks very good.

Is there syntax for dependent tasks in the timeline? In other words tasks that only start once prerequisites are done.

If the date of the original tasks changes, the dependent tasks move accordingly automatically, without needing to edit a full list of dates for each dependent item.


It's a timeline that tracks events and periods. It doesn't seem to have the concept of a task in any way.

It has checklists

Besides the tool itself that website typography is excellent. Guess I'll have to use Playfair in my next project.

Edit: One thing I'd like to see with the basic syntax example is fiddle with your default dates to make it more obvious that the span is a span. At the time scale it is now, it just looks like another dot.


Just edited the example so it looks like a span, thanks for the feedback!

Just in case anyone else is out of the loop like me. This can be used as a plugin in obsidian! https://obsidian.md/plugins?search=markw

This reminds me of blocks.md (https://blocks.md/), a Markdown based form builder.

This looks excellent - i've been looking for a timeline-based, simple-entry tool like this. Well done.

Any chance you can copy some of this for aesthetics? https://www.chronoflotimeline.com/timeline/shared/3118/Home-...

Hopefully without the latency, it's slow to respond on a 2022 M2 Macbook Air (tried Firefox and Safari)

I wonder how easy it is to render the timeline in a custom manner

Really cool project, looking forward to using it in Obsidian.

This looks amazing, will definitely try to incorporate it into my workflow!

> for plainly writing logs , gantt charts , blogs , feeds , notes , journals etc.

So, how would this combine with markdown, for the content within dated blog/journal entries? And how would I use dates as plain dates rather than special markwhen entities?


OK, this is fantastic, like others mentioned. Now... to figure out how to use it in existing markdown... love the Obsidian integration.

Is there support for date ranges? e.g. 2024-12-25 - 2025-01-06 ?

It's the second example in "Basic Syntax" on the right.



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