Markwhen

Productivity

timelines and planning

SHOW HN2024

912points
98comments
#11of 3,515 in 2024
Top 1%of 2024 by points

How HN took it

MixedNo clear lean

21 positive, 29 neutral or asking, 2 mixed, 10 critical, out of 62 comments about the project. Thread score +0.24.

Idea: 10 for, 2 againstDesign: 1 for, 6 againstExecution: 2 for, 1 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Looks excellent and elegant as a Markdown-style timeline tool

    From 4 comments
    • This looks amazing, will definitely try to incorporate it into my workflow!
      sleepyfran on HN
    • This looks excellent - i've been looking for a timeline-based, simple-entry tool like this. Well done.
      robinhowlett on HN
    • That is such an elegant solution. True sweet spot which was missing for me in traditional markdown!
      IndieCoder on HN
    • 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…
      thomasreggi on HN
  • Used for a client Gantt chart proposal

    From 1 comment
    • 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…
      mturk on HN
  • Better than Mermaid for timelines

    From 1 comment
    • i was using mermaid for this for years, but markwhen just seems/feels instantly easier.
      bcooney_info on HN

Objections

  • Date range syntax with slashes and dashes is unintuitive

    From 3 comments
    • Things like Markdown work because they are intuitive, but the date range syntax in Markwhen is anything but intuitive. Why 2025-01-22 / 2026-10-24? Why not 2025/01/22 - 2026/10/24?
      dustedcodes on HN
    • 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…
      dustedcodes on HN
    • 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 /…
      account42 on HN
  • Laggy performance in some browsers

    From 3 comments
    • Hopefully without the latency, it's slow to respond on a 2022 M2 Macbook Air (tried Firefox and Safari)
      owlglass on HN
    • Not OP, but on Firefox 132, Sonoma 14.4, M1 Pro, it's quite janky. It's less so on Chrome and Safari, but it's still noticeable.
      maleldil on HN
    • On a 3,2 GHz 6-Core i7 Mac Mini with Safari it also feels very laggy and unpleasant to use.
      dewey on HN
  • Sign-up and sign-in are hard to find

    From 1 comment
    • Looks very good. 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.
      d--b on HN

Requests

  • Support for dependent tasks

    From 2 comments
    • 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…
      snappr021 on HN
    • 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…
      maroonblazer on HN
  • Calendar integration with Google Calendar and iCal

    From 2 comments
    • 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,…
      garfieldnate on HN
    • 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.…
      koch on HN
  • Intel builds for Meridiem

    From 1 comment
    • Meridiem seems to only have ARM builds, no Intel builds. Could you perhaps update it to include Intel?
      ynx on HN
  • Mobile layout fixes

    From 1 comment
    • 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
      jusgu on HN

Questions

  • What license is used?

    From 1 comment
    • pretty nifty tool. What license are you using for distribution?
      jagermo on HN
  • Is the project open source?

    From 1 comment
    • 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…
      RestartKernel on HN
  • Does it work with pandoc or org-mode?

    From 2 comments

Alternatives named

  • Mermaid timeline and Gantt charts

    From 2 comments
    • Note that Mermaid also supports timelines (if it is new enough): https://mermaid.js.org/syntax/timeline.html Mermaid is supported by gitlab/github and other markdown editors…
      atoav on HN
    • Mermaid Gannt[0] diagram type might be similar to what you have in mind. [0] https://mermaid.js.org/syntax/gantt.html
      edvardas on HN
  • Org mode

    From 2 comments
    • Again reimplementing Emacs Org mode. Nice work! This looks terrific, but honestly Markdown is a document markup language. Org mode, while superficially similar in scope, is…
      dotancohen on HN
    • Have you looked at org mode for eMacs? That does precisely this
      funnybeam on HN
  • Chronos Timeline Obsidian plugin

    From 1 comment
    • Love this! If you're into representing time with simple markdown, check out the Chronos Timeline plugin for Obsidian too https://obsidian.md/plugins?search=chronos+timeline
      marjipan200 on HN
  • cheeaun life timeline

    From 1 comment
    • 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…
      accrual on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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