Show HN: Markwhen: Markdown for Timelines

Good job! Would like to see it as an independent file format and tools like external editor support and cli compiler (to html/pdf/svg etc.)

Looks similar to Mermaid-js's Gantt chart support: https://mermaid-js.github.io/mermaid/#/gantt

Once nice thing about Mermaid is it's built into [GitHub's markdown](https://github.blog/2022-02-14-include-diagrams-markdown-fil...) and has support in Notion

As mentioned in a Github issue, would love to store the Markdown file in my code repository (roadmap) and the markwhen server to deploy hosting the file to my static domain when I deploy my code.

Other than that, you are making amazing progress! And fast also.

This looks neat. I wish it used iso8601 [0] dates. It’s pretty convenient as the time periods uses the format YYYY-MM-DD/YYYY-MM-DD and I think is easier to mentally parse than MM/DD/YYYY-MM/DD/YYYY.

Of course I didn’t even know what a solidus (“/“) was until using iso8601.

Also, I usually find standards pretty much as overhead, but 8601 seems pretty good as a universal standard.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

Really awesome to see this evolving to this stage :)

Maybe I'm skimming over this too quickly... but what part of this is like markdown exactly? The monospace font?

Does seem potentially cool and useful though.

Fcuking hell, this looks good!

How about a markdown for any hierarchical info?

And diffing to know what changed on git etc.

This is very cool! Awesome job!

Very interesting. Why is there work inside of the education sections of the life timeline? In the project planning example, I could see it being useful to have something like $ref references from Swagger to e.g. reference a duration from a project group into the overall section.

This is awesome! I want to see other tools like this. I dream of a project management system that is text based and lives in your codebase seems we are pretty close with this. Planning (this), comments / descriptions (markdown), identity / people (??), tickets (??) Anyone know of something like this?

This might not be what you're targeting as a use case, but is there any way to do BCE dates?

Nice. It is open source?

Very cool! One suggestion, this is not Markdown, this is plain text for timelines.

Don’t be afraid to distinguish your tool from its inspirations.

wow very cool, light mode can be also cool

Hat tip to a fellow follower of CGP Grey's yearly themes :)

Clicking and dragging doesn't seem to work for me. Firefox 102.0b8, Linux

Someone at Microsoft please please buy/license/implement this for GitHub projects.

Warning: this comment is just for fun

Missed opportunity not naming it "Markdown for When (feat Lil Jon)

I like it! very pretty and useful. I really needed for something like that for commercial proposals. Nice work

This is an excellent landing page that immediately draws my attention and shows why I'd want to use this. This is a great example of how a landing page can demonstrate a tool quickly.

For all those who are requesting ISO8601 dates -- according to the GitHub repo [0] these are already supported:

> Dates: A date can be expressed in a few forms. Human readable dates are supported, like 1665, 03/2222, or 09/11/2001, as well as IO8601 dates, like 2031-11-19T01:35:10Z.

[0]: https://github.com/kochrt/markwhen

Crazy, I just had this idea last week. Although I was imagining a “mermaid for roadmaps”, so closely related but not exactly the same. This looks really cool though!

This would enable a much appreciated Obsidian plugin, it seems a natural fit

Anyone ever run across anything like this with a simple syntax that can do a timeline with split AND merges? I've always wanted something like the linux timeline [1] as an interactive timeline that can both split and merge.

[1]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Linux_Di...

I'm working on an MIT-licensed time-tracking tool in my spare time and I'm hoping somebody (in a "this is not legal advice"-capacity at least) can enlighten me on licensing here:

If I am understanding the AGPL-3.0 correctly (and assuming that the format is also under the license), I could NOT add an "export to Markwhen" feature to my project without then being forced to convert it to AGPL-3.0. Is this correct?

Can the renderer be used separately to embed in other editors?

I’ve been working on markwhen as a way to easily create timelines just from text.

I’ve used it personally to help plan and coordinate my own wedding (https://markwhen.com/rob/wedding) and for keeping track of life events, and I’ve seen it used for event planning, project management, and to visualize historical events or periods of time.

I personally like tools that let you immediately start using them, and I set out to do that here with markwhen.

Let me know if you have any questions!

nice! i have been using a combination of org-mode / taskjuggler to produce gantt so far. Bit this looks nice and could be use for simpler use cases.

I definitely can't use this, the date overhead is too much. I agree with the other commenter, YYYY-MM-DD is the way to go.

If only this were a vertical timeline with a print-friendly format. Its great, but a guy can dream....