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.
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.
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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
For the record, I used the Obsidian plugin to develop, then deployed as static HTML.
Did you need/use that functionality?
Just a note. It was really hard to find how to sign up.
EDIT: and I still haven't found how to sign in in the desktop app.
Are you planning to open source it? I couldn't find it on your GitHub.
https://github.com/cheeaun/life
Sample file (from the repository):
[1] https://days.rory.codes
[2] https://git.rjp.is/rjp/daysgo
https://jvidal.dev/memento-mori
Mermaid is supported by gitlab/github and other markdown editors (within code blocks).
[0] https://mermaid.js.org/syntax/gantt.html
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.
Gruber (who has trademark in “Markdown”), appears to not like people using his trademark name.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-commo...
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.
Same thing with MediaWiki - I love the wiki system but WikiText is just so bad.
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.
Thanks for sharing!