Markwhen looks all well and fine, but is it really necessary to build a timeline from scratch every time you need one (and learn another coding language to be able to do this)?
Wouldn’t it be much more helpful (and cooler), if this could be done using a simple search command (like a dataview query)? I posted a feature request for this here, but don’t have much faith that this will be done any time soon.
As a writer I often struggle with creating timelines, but I imagine that there are lots of other use cases (historians, journalists, all types of sciences that include time-related subjects), and even the pure wish to create a timeline of your notes, or some notes with a certain tag could be an interesting application.
For the pure creation of a timeline I found an app a few weeks ago (I described it HERE ). That app does not include an export to markdown, but you can the timeline to an svg-file, which can the be altered and linked to all necessary notes via the Excalidraw plugin.
This might be helpful for a limited time, but needs much extra work any time there is need for a display of time related events, periods or epochs. What is actually needed, is a way to create a timeline of data that already exists: as Metadata in any note (as creation-date, modification-date, or a date that is in a metadata-field (which I would presume is required anyway in the before mentioned disciplines).
So why create another markdown note with a special syntax when all relevant date already exists?
I would like to propose the following idea:
Use the markwhen tool as a “display-engine”, whose input can be provided by a “dataview-like” query, based on tags or folders and metadata already existing (or declarable) in obsidian notes.
Sorry, long post. Thanks for your patience.
P.S. @redcod : Sorry to say so, but its nice If you can do this and have the time to spend 3 days on this. But I would fathom that most of the users of obsidian use the app for working in their field of expertise, not for learning 4 programming languages and programming with them. Let alone having the time. I certainly don’t. But if it is that easy, why don’t you take on the task and share it with us?
No offense!