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Show HN: Markwhen: Markdown for Timelines
- metaketa 4y agoAs 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.
- koch 4y agoI’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 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!
- moasda 4y agoCool tool, thanks for sharing!
- majkinetor 4y agoFantastic. ISO8601 date is a must, otherwise, its delightful :)
- mholt 4y agoVery cool. Some great ideas here as I build a visualizer for Timeliner [0] (effectively its successor, Timelinize [1]) in my spare time! Did you build the timeline UI yourself? Can it be used as a library? [0]: https://github.com/mholt/timeliner https://github.com/mholt/timeliner [1]: https://twitter.com/timelinize https://twitter.com/timelinize
- yawnxyz 4y agohope your dad recovered from his hospital visit!
- renanwilliam 4y agoI like it! very pretty and useful. I really needed for something like that for commercial proposals. Nice work
- NathHorrigan 4y agoThis is very cool! Awesome job!
- aloisdg 4y agoNice. It is open source?
- zimpenfish 4y agoLicense says yes. https://github.com/kochrt/markwhen/blob/main/LICENSE https://github.com/kochrt/markwhen/blob/main/LICENSE > kochrt/markwhen is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
- koch 4y agohttps://github.com/kochrt/markwhen https://github.com/kochrt/markwhen is about a month behind the live website. The upstream repo that the live site uses is available to sponsors.
- prepend 4y agoThis 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
- michaelcampbell 4y ago8601 is fine, but generally MASSIVELY overkill. RFC 3339 might be a bit easier and accomplishes what you want. https://ijmacd.github.io/rfc3339-iso8601/ https://ijmacd.github.io/rfc3339-iso8601/
- koch 4y agoYeah, so long form 8601 are supported `2022-08-02T23:00:00.000Z - 2022-08-03T00:00:00.000Z: Event` but in general I do need to figure out a way to allow more customizable date parsing.[0] [0]https://github.com/kochrt/markwhen/issues/27 https://github.com/kochrt/markwhen/issues/27
- JoshTriplett 4y agoI would definitely like to use YYYY-MM or YYYY-MM-DD, ideally without any additional configuration required.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- chriswarbo 4y ago> 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 Especially for those outside the USA!
- ethbr0 4y agoAs someone who grew up in the US, it's still bizarre as a programmer to have a mixed-significance ordering (MM-DD-YYYY) instead of any consistently-endian ordering (DD-MM-YYYY or YYYY-MM-DD). Out of curiosity, in what order do Europeans verbally say full dates with month names? Or does it vary by language?
- cheeaun 4y agoReally awesome to see this evolving to this stage :)
- koch 4y agoI'm glad you're here to see it! So cheeaun here posted his life timeline project[0] 9 years ago (!) to hacker news[1] and I always thought it was pretty neat. I made a tool to make timelines like that and it has since evolved into markwhen. [0] https://github.com/cheeaun/life https://github.com/cheeaun/life [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6833565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6833565
- metaketa 4y agoYes, very awesome what you did with it! Really promising to use as a developer. Always hated all the roadmapping tools that required to generate the roadmap in the tool itself instead of Roadmap-as-Code.
- jzig 4y agoVery 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.
- koch 4y agoThere are relative dates, so you can refer to previous events when defining new ones: https://markwhen.com/docs#relative-dates https://markwhen.com/docs#relative-dates
- scrollaway 4y agoHat tip to a fellow follower of CGP Grey's yearly themes :)
- lootsauce 4y agoThis 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?
- metaketa 4y agoIt doesn't exist yet but it needs to be built. Project-management-as-code. This would be the roadmap interface. Let's kill Jira.
- Dangeranger 4y agoVery cool! One suggestion, this is not Markdown, this is plain text for timelines. Don’t be afraid to distinguish your tool from its inspirations.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pxeger1 4y agoClicking and dragging doesn't seem to work for me. Firefox 102.0b8, Linux
- pluc 4y agoSomeone at Microsoft please please buy/license/implement this for GitHub projects.
- darknavi 4y agoElsewhere someone said Mermaid is supported already by GitHub: https://mermaid-js.github.io/mermaid/#/gantt https://mermaid-js.github.io/mermaid/#/gantt
- wortelefant 4y agoThis would enable a much appreciated Obsidian plugin, it seems a natural fit
- ytechie 4y agoObsidian supports Mermaid charts. I've used that for this type of chart before, to plan a trip.
- boomskats 4y agoWhile the Gantt in Mermaid is decent, this would be far, far superior as a bidirectional plugin (i.e capable of both visualisation and editing the original markdown). I'd happily pay for this as an Obsidian plugin.
- laurent123456 4y agoCan the renderer be used separately to embed in other editors?
- koch 4y agoNot right now, but it's something I've been thinking about, in addition to separating the parser out https://github.com/kochrt/markwhen/issues/32 https://github.com/kochrt/markwhen/issues/32
- ivanjermakov 4y agoGood 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.)
- Zhyl 4y agoSeconding this. I'd love to use this tool, but ideally I want to be editing in the text editor/IDE of my choice and then to be able to own the viewer offline. This would be especially important for actual project management as employers/clients don't tend to allow you to use online tools and that's what I'd most likely be using this for.
- trenchgun 4y agoThirding this. Ideally this would be an emacs package.
- captbaritone 4y agoLooks similar to Mermaid-js's Gantt chart support: https://mermaid-js.github.io/mermaid/#/gantt 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-files-mermaid/ https://github.blog/2022-02-14-include-diagrams-markdown-fil...) and has support in Notion
- bombledmonk 4y agoAnyone 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_Distribution_Timeline.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Linux_Di...
- zaep 4y agoI'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?
- ChadNauseam 4y agoNo, nobody can copyright a file format
- ethanwillis 4y agoThis, similarly you could copy(reimplement) the entire API for this software if you wish with some caveats.
- koch 4y agoIn addition to what others have said, I personally would love to see people using the format, so please go ahead! I'd be interested to see what you're working on!
- howmayiannoyyou 4y agoIf only this were a vertical timeline with a print-friendly format. Its great, but a guy can dream....
- koch 4y agoExporting to pdf/png does a good job of getting everything into view. Otherwise the 'doc' view (the third view option button in the bottom left corner) might be your best bet, it just displays a list
- DiggyJohnson 4y agoHey! Thanks for the workaround. Still, I second this feature request, and opened an issue in your repo. https://github.com/kochrt/markwhen/issues/35 https://github.com/kochrt/markwhen/issues/35 Awesome project. Thanks for sharing.
- EGreg 4y agoHow about a markdown for any hierarchical info? And diffing to know what changed on git etc.
- yucelfaruksahan 4y agowow very cool, light mode can be also cool
- trenchgun 4y agoFcuking hell, this looks good!
- Slix 4y agoThis 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.
- yashasolutions 4y agonice! 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.
- account-5 4y agoI 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.
- metaketa 4y agoAgreed, the date thing is stopping me too still for now. I'm waiting for symbolic headers! Or the use of relative dates.
- corytheboyd 4y agoWarning: this comment is just for fun Missed opportunity not naming it "Markdown for When (feat Lil Jon)
- danielvaughn 4y agoCrazy, 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!
- andrewxhonson 4y agoThis might not be what you're targeting as a use case, but is there any way to do BCE dates?
- nixpulvis 4y agoMaybe 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.
- asaibx 4y agoFor 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 https://github.com/kochrt/markwhen