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What the timeline (.timeline) is for
Last updated September 9, 2026 · 6 min read
In one line: what the timeline file is for, and how it divides the work with the beat board and the Headings panel.
Story time is not chapter order
Chapter order is the order a reader meets things in. Story time is the order they happened in. The moment you write a flashback, a second thread, or a memory, those two come apart — and a file tree can only hold the first one.
Ink Tide is that kind of book. The main thread sits in Moon 3 of Chengwen 107, where Shen Yan is copying the Tide Records at the You'an Scriptorium. The earliest thing in the story is old Licheng sinking beneath the sea, a hundred and ten years before that. Nothing in the file tree tells you how far apart those two are, because the file tree is sorted by chapter.
A timeline is the file that does. Right-click a folder in the Explorer, choose New Timeline, and you get a .timeline file — versioned and restorable like any manuscript or script.
What is inside one
Events. A title, a time, and some labels. That is the whole of an event. It lives only inside this file — it is not a shadow copy of a note or a chapter — so something like "this is the year the song starts going around the harbour", which no chapter covers, still has a home.
Three ways to mark time. No time, free text, or a calendar date, mixed freely in the same file. Fifteen of the sixteen events in Ink Tide sit on dates in the Chengwen calendar. The opening one — "The Ink Tide calamity: old Licheng sinks beneath the sea" — carries the free-text time "Three years before Chengwen", because in that era the calendar did not exist yet.
Labels, which become lanes. Ink Tide uses two: Main (nine events) and The Past (seven). Put them side by side and you can see what each thread is doing at the same moment. A label you give no colour to gets one from a fixed palette, in order.
Two views. Timeline is a vertical flow of lanes and is always available. Calendar only appears once you turn a calendar on, and it lays out its grid using the months and week length you defined — not the Gregorian ones.
How it divides the work
| The question you have | What to open |
|---|---|
| When did this happen, and what was the other thread doing then? | Timeline .timeline |
| What shape is this story? Which act does this chapter belong in? | Beat board .beats |
| What are the headings inside this one manuscript? | The Headings panel in the activity bar |
| Who is what to whom? | Relationship map .map |
| Where does this happen? | Map .geomap |
Timeline and beat board are the two people mix up. The beat board is about reading order: one column per act, cards for chapters or beats, and you decide there what a reader meets first. The timeline is about story time. A flashback is exactly the place where those two stop agreeing, which is the reason to keep both.
The AI can edit it
If you have read a note saying the timeline is read-only to the AI, that note is out of date.
The AI has five tools of its own here: add an event, change one, remove one, set the calendar, and a batch that does several of those at once. It acts when you ask in AI Chat — nothing tidies your chronology in the background.
Every change is shown to you first. Dashed cards appear on the timeline with accept and skip on them, and a floating pill in the corner counts the pending changes and can accept them all. Until you accept, not one byte of the file has changed — read it and you get the old version. The calendar view has no event cards to hang review buttons on, so that pill is the only place to accept from in that mode.
Two things the AI deliberately cannot do:
- Every event it adds is a standalone event. It never sees the internal ids of your notes and chapters, and a guessed one would put a line on your timeline pointing at a note that does not exist.
- A source you attached by hand survives its edits. That title belongs to the file the entry came from, not to the timeline, so the AI cannot rename it either.
The calendar tool never touches entries. Switch to free ordering and every date stays exactly where it was; switch back and they all come home unchanged.
It does not count words
A timeline is planning data, not prose. Its word count is always zero, so it stays out of your daily word count and your writing streak. Spend a whole evening on your chronology and the writing calendar still shows that day as empty. That is on purpose — otherwise scaffolding would inflate the numbers you use to judge yourself.
Editable on a phone
The timeline is editable on phones: tap an event and it opens as a bottom sheet, and so does the calendar wizard. The one structured file that is view-only on a phone is the map (.geomap), not this.
Related
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