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 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.
Congratulations on your release! I've working on building exactly the same tool but you beat me to it... I cannot compete with this functionality, and completeness. Amazing work!
Remark.ing sounds incredible. I've been considering building something like Memos but based on Markdown files rather than a relational database for personal use, but this comes really close to what I was looking for.
Are you planning to open source it? I couldn't find it on your GitHub.
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.
@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
That is a great project! I wonder if anyone has created a visualization that uses a "life in weeks" format (like https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html) rather than a linear horizontal timeline.
The charts you linked don't look like the same kind of chart to me. There's information about what happened after what, but the information about how much each task took seems missing.
Right now I'm using YAML for the file format, as I wanted something that would be reasonably readable for both humans and machines.
Markwhen would also fit the bill nicely, so that's something to consider, at least as an export format.
My entries have a lot of properties, though (stuff like wind speed, vessel coordinates, barometer, etc). Traditional ship's logbooks were done in a tabular manner to record all this. So I'm not sure if that would end up looking quite messy.
Here is an example of a day of log entries in the current format:
https://github.com/meri-imperiumi/log/blob/main/_data/logboo...
I'm using these also for some data analysis, like watermaker membrane health, or sailed miles per crew member.
It’s plausible that it could be a trademark issue, were “markdown” strongly enforced. “When” isn’t the furthest from “down”. However, the reason behind Gruber’s issue with it has been misinterpreted and the Markdown name is very widely used without any arrangement with its creator, and a trademark for Markdown is not registered with the USPTO by its creator AFAICT.
> However, the reason behind Gruber’s issue with it has been misinterpreted and the Markdown name is very widely used without any arrangement with its creator
Correct. Not to get too in the weeds on a 10 year old controversy, but Gruber has gone on the record to say he is cool with things like GitHub-flavored Markdown but from what I gathered back then and since then whenever he spoke on the subject (which has not been a lot), his issue with the CommonMark project (as it would eventually be called) using any name that included “Markdown” in the name wasn’t cool with him since they went ahead with an ask forgiveness instead of receiving permission approach on attempting to basically expropriate Markdown. GitHub-flavored Markdown and things like it don’t do that, they just claim to be a different kind of Markdown.
Also never understood why he didn’t just go ahead and trademark it, but at this point would it even be enforceable? It’s kind of generic now, but I don’t know if it’s generic enough to not be enforceable either, and maybe he doesn’t want the obligation of having to enforce it.
EDIT: anyway, point is, this is so far from being Markdown or claiming to be that I don’t think there is a single issue with Markwhen as presented that would ruffle any feathers in Philly. The creator shouldn’t have to worry and nobody should be telling him to worry. Like, seriously, none of this is relevant. Markwhen is just a cool looking thing that exists now and I like timelines.
Here's the license (http://daringfireball.net/projects/downloads/Markdown_1.0.1....) and I don't think Gruber mentioned anything about a "trademark"? It seems like it was mostly about the name of his project just being taken unethically. Just like if someone would take a open source project name and makes it look like an official for when it's not. Maybe not a trademark infringement, but certainly not nice or ethical.
Joel tried to write an IETF Standard by the backdoor for a thing he didn't invent.
Having been kicked off the word standard, they immediately thought "how can we still do this while technically obeying it". So they picked the closest possible word to Standard, implying it really was the definitive version.
Yeah, I'd be grumpy too.
If he'd called it 'Atwood Flavoured Markdown' there wouldn't be an issue. But Joel wanted to own the definition of Markdown.
As a group of tech CEOs they decided to co-opt someone's idea without even asking if it was okay.
In fact kicking John off the project was the point.
You can do that, you just can't keep the name they created.
This looks terrific, but honestly Markdown is a document markup language. Org mode, while superficially similar in scope, is actually a data storage and exchange format. The data manipulation and querying built around Org mode are unlikely to be replicated in Markdown.
Agree. This could be easily done in org. I feel that if org was more popular, a lot of these solutions would disappear, or would be a small project that just reads some org properties.
I guess it would be key to have better support for easier editors, like vscode and maybe even a dedicated editor
I really want to like Org mode, but I just can't. The syntax feels too out of place. With markdown it's just a few extra symbols, but using Org mode feels like writing LaTeX in a way.
Same thing with MediaWiki - I love the wiki system but WikiText is just so bad.
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.
That's weird. It works perfectly for men much older computers and also on my M2 Mac Pro. What version of OSX are you using? I created that product, btw.
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.
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.
> 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?
This is really cool, I wish there was some sort of life planner software where I can write down appointments, notes, ideas, and more in a simple format like Markdown, and automatically get notifications/reminders based on what I wrote.
Big fan of timelines. I am going to use this for sure
Have had an idea for a timeline search/visualization. Search a thing and that pulls pages and related pages with date/times from Wikipedia. With a zoom in/out to adjust resolution like google maps - weight nodes on timeline based on page views/edits/links. Have not gotten around to try to make something like it.
I bring it up here just in case something already exists and I missed it.
Because this is ISO 8601 date format, the standard date format that intentionally uses dashes to not confuse 25/01/22, 01/22/25 and 22/01/26 which are the same date in different formats
(that's why it uses dashes for dates, as for why it uses / for interval I have no idea)
Thanks for linking that. I’m a big proponent of using ISO 8601 but had either missed or completely forgotten about it specifying a format for intervals.
Note that ISO also permits a double hyphen as the interval separator which is hugely preferable to me personally and also works with file names (as mentioned in that Wikipedia article)
I know ISO 8601, but that doesn't answer my question. Let me rephrase this, why was a format intuitive to a machine chosen instead of a format which feels more intuitive to a human?
I think YYYY/MM/DD - YYYY/MM/DD will mean the correct thing to many more people than YYYY-MM-DD / YYYY-MM-DD, which I suspect many will interpret as an OR and not a RANGE.
Personally I think it goes a little over-flexible on support for non-strict formatted dates to the point it becomes difficult to figure out what a given date string is going to result in rather than feeling easier to use. That's probably part of the reason the primary example uses the clearer format.
I'm with you on / not being a good range separator but using it for the individual dates is much much worse. Please stick to - for YYYY-MM-DD to avoid confusion and keep / restricted to inbred date formats.
I would love to be able to manage my actual calendar with this. By which I mean, I want a seamless bridge with google calendar, iCal, etc. that also lets me view, edit, source-control, etc. my calendar with an mw file. I think this is very cool!
How would one go about creating Obsidian support for a timeline that was scattered across multiple files?
I'm thinking like the network visualizer that Obsidian has, it would be great if it could find tagged dates in any file and display them on a common timeline.
Just wanted to say congrats on the project. This is truly a masterpiece from the utility of it, the novelty, to execution with the vscode / meridian app, and sass. Brilliant execution!
I'd love something that can support uncertain timelines - I maintain a list of space events that I'm interested in, but I haven't yet figured out how to do the dates.
Nice, these “Markdown for X” tools are super neat. Wish this worked nicely with mobile view, seems like a lot of the text are overflowing and margins are squished in the demo
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