Events, times and lanes

In one line: add events, mark their time, split them into lanes with labels, and take the whole thing with you.

Add an event

Five entry points, depending on where you already are:

1. ＋ Event in the toolbar — creates one and opens its Edit event window right away.
2. On an empty timeline, + Add an event.
3. Click any empty day in the calendar view — creates one on that day, date already filled in.
4. + Add here in a lane header — creates one already carrying that lane's label.
5. Drag a file in from the Explorer — covered separately below.

Double-click a card to rename it in place; right-click for its menu (Rename / Add comment / Delete event).

Three ways to mark time

Click a card to open Edit event. The Time section is three buttons side by side:

• No time — write down what happened; you decide the position by dragging.
• Free text — "three years later", "on the eve of war". A calendar never forces this into a date.
• Calendar date — year / month / day, plus optional hour and minute (the minute field depends on the hour, so it stays disabled until you set one). Without a calendar this button is inert and tells you to "Enable the calendar first to use dates".

Edit event, from the top down:

Row	What is in it
Title	The event's name. A card you dragged in from a file has no title row — its title came from the file
Time	Three buttons side by side: No time · Free text · Calendar date. With no calendar the third one is dead, and hovering it says Enable the calendar first to use dates
under Free text	One field, prompting "three years later"…
under Calendar date	Five small fields — Y, M, D, HH, MM. MM stays disabled until HH has something in it, and the formatted date is echoed under the row
Era	Free mode only. In calendar mode this row is not there at all, because the year-month bands are generated
Labels	This event's coloured chips, plus a field: Type a label name, Enter to add…
Footer	Delete event at one end, Done at the other

All three mix in one file. Of the sixteen events in Ink Tide, fifteen sit on Chengwen dates, and five of those give only a year — "Chengwen 77" is a perfectly legal, deliberately vague precision. The opening event uses the free text "Three years before Chengwen", because that era predates the calendar.

Dated events sort themselves; undated ones go where you drag them. When a calendar is on, a new event gets a date by default — the one it would have landed on anyway from its sort position, so committing it does not make the card jump. Switch it back to No time or Free text if that is not what you wanted.

In the calendar view, an event with no committed date shows as a dashed, faded chip reading "No committed date — placed by order; click to set a date". Drag a chip to another day to change its date; the time of day is kept.

Era bands

In free mode the edit window has an extra Era field. Type something like "Before" or "Now" and the timeline draws a separator band wherever the value changes.

Calendar mode has no such field, because the year-month bands are generated for you — the "Moon 3, Chengwen 107" bands running down the Ink Tide timeline come from the dates themselves.

Labels become lanes

One label is one column. Three ways to make one:

• ＋ Label in the toolbar opens the label panel; type a name in the bottom field and press Enter.
• The "+" at the end of the lane row takes the name right there. Handy, since the toolbar panel can be a long way from where you are looking.
• The bottom field of the Edit event window creates the label and attaches it to this event in one go.

Each row of the label panel can be renamed in place (renaming updates every event carrying that label), given a colour, moved left or right with ◀ ▶, and deleted with ✕.

The panel has its own close button at the top, and Esc or a click outside also closes it. If you typed a name and closed without pressing Enter, that name is submitted rather than thrown away.

One event, several threads

An event can carry several labels. The first one is its primary column — that is where the real card lives. Other columns show an echo card pointing at the same event; one event is one record, so dragging it in any column changes the same time.

• Drag a card sideways into another lane to change its primary. The target label moves to the front and nothing already on the event is removed.
• Events with no label at all collect in Unassigned, which always sorts last.
• At most eight lanes show at once. Beyond that they collapse and a Show all lanes control appears.
• Click a lane header, or use Show only this lane in its menu, to solo it. A pill at the top says which lane you are in and puts everything back.
• If a lane goes four time points without reappearing, a note under it reads "absent for the next N time points — time to wrap it up?". That is a nudge, not an error; a subplot you dropped on purpose can ignore it.
• Two events at the same point in time sit side by side and are marked Same time. Drag one up or down if you want an order between them.

Bringing a chapter or a note in

Drag a file from the Explorer onto the timeline and an event appears where you dropped it, titled with that file's display name.

Comments

Right-click a card and choose Add comment. The comment is anchored to the event, not to a run of text, so it stays put however you drag the card or change its time. The number in the corner of a card is its open comments; click it to open the comment. From the Comments panel, "jump to comment" selects that event and scrolls to it, switching back from the calendar view first if you were there.

Export and portability

Export .timeline on the right of the toolbar downloads the file itself. It works in read-only mode too — read-only means you cannot change it, not that you cannot take it.

Two related things. On a public share link the timeline is visible but not editable — only the Calendar / Timeline toggle survives. And when you compare two versions in version history you get a summary — how many events, labels and settings changed — instead of a wall of JSON.

On a phone

Editable. Tapping an event opens it as a sheet, and calendar settings slide up from the bottom. The controls are enlarged to finger size.

Related

• Docs: What the timeline (.timeline) is for
• Docs: Create a timeline and decide about a calendar
• Docs: Inline comments
• Docs: Public read-only share link
• Docs: Browse version history and diff
• Docs: Comprehensive export guide
• Docs: Mobile gestures