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Radial timeline

by ericrhystaylor
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Score: 63/100
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Description

Visualize longform writing projects as an interactive radial timeline that displays scenes organized by act, subplot, and narrative or chronological order for a complete view of the project.

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54
stars
8,104
downloads
2
forks
124
days
0
days
6
days
33
total PRs
0
open PRs
2
closed PRs
31
merged PRs
16
total issues
0
open issues
16
closed issues
2,840
commits

Latest Version

7.3.1
7 days ago

Changelog

Radial Timeline 7.3.1

Scene time now measures your prose against the scene's declared Duration, and your Community page counts every word you write, not only drafting.

Scene time

  • A running total before you confirm anything. The title bar used to show Elapsed — until you confirmed a time cue. It now shows a provisional total, such as Elapsed ~2h 30m, built from your confirmed cues plus the suggested durations of the ones you haven't confirmed yet. Once every cue is confirmed, the exact figure replaces it. The Scene time panel shows the same number.
  • The Duration line. When a scene has a Duration in its properties, the cue bar beside your prose draws it as a thin line and measures the prose against it. Prose within 10% of the Duration counts as a match.
    • Prose falls short: the line runs the full length and ends in a down arrow, red when time phrases cover part of the Duration and gray when no phrase gives the scene any time. Hover it for the shortfall.
    • Prose runs past it: the line turns yellow and stops at the time phrase that passes the Duration. It is dashed while the overage rests on cues you haven't confirmed, and solid once confirmed time alone runs past.
    • The title bar agrees with the line: a yellow Check timing while the overage is unconfirmed, a red Review timing once it is confirmed. The Scene time panel has a key for the line and arrows.
  • Radial Timeline only reads Duration; it never writes to your scene properties.

Community

  • Daily words count every mode. Your Community page's daily words now include revising, editing, and planning sessions, not only drafting, so a season spent revising no longer reads as zero words.
  • Your season catches up. The first sync after updating sends your last 12 weeks once, even if you haven't written since. A vault later connected to a different Community profile sends that profile its own 12 weeks.
  • The Community Share preview lists the per-day words before anything leaves the vault. Daily words follow the same sharing level as the rest of your progress; nothing new becomes public on its own.

Model support

  • Claude Opus 5.5 is now the default Anthropic model; Opus 5 remains available.
  • GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna replace GPT-5.6 Sol and Luna.
  • Gemini 3.8 Flash replaces Gemini 3.5 Flash on the speed lane.

Fixes

  • All Scenes number squares no longer repeat. When no subplot was named "Main Plot", the outer ring's scene numbers were drawn a second time, interleaving duplicates around the ring. Each scene is now numbered once.
See all version on GitHub

README file from

Github

Shell execution and Direct filesystem access are used for Pandoc manuscript publishing. See Privacy & Security.

Try It

  • Website — Radial Timeline and its companion plugin, Editorialist, feature by feature.
  • Demo vault — Pride & Prejudice, a finished novel fully mapped in the timeline with AI analysis included.
  • Newsletter — release news and notes from the workshop.
  • Community — writers sharing books in progress and answering each other's questions.

What It Does

Radial Timeline® arranges your scenes by act, subplot, narrative or chronological order in a striking radial layout—revealing the structure, rhythm, and scope of your story. Each ring represents a subplot; hover interactions surface important details like scene synopsis and AI story pulses. Scenes highlight across subplots to show interrelationships. Multiple view modes present your novel like an X-ray.

Before After
Scrolling through line after line of spreadsheet tables and files, losing sight of how your B-plot interweaves with the main storyline. One visual map showing every scene, every subplot, color coded and ordered in context and connected to the big picture.

Radial Timeline® captures and visualizes four core timelines, letting you see manuscript order, story chronology, writing progress, and revision stage in one connected view.

  • Narrative time: the sequence you reveal events to readers.
  • Chronological time: when events happen in your story's world.
  • Author time: your scene writing progress with target due dates tracking Todo, Working, Complete, and Overdue.
  • Progress stages: manuscript revision stages from Zero draft through Press-ready.

The mode buttons run in this order: Progress, Narrative, Chronologue, and Gossamer. Narrative and Chronologue keep subplot colors front-and-center so you can compare structure without workflow noise. When you need to see Todo/Working/Overdue status or progress stage colors, switch to Progress Mode, where the combined outer ring is replaced by a single-subplot view and scenes inherit the author-status and progress-stage palette.

Docs (How-to & Setup)

If you want the "how-to" details (setup, sets, properties, reordering, advanced options), they live in the wiki:

Sets, Properties, and Templates

  • Sets define the structural fields used in your notes.
  • Properties are custom metadata fields added to notes.
  • Presets are starter configurations for campaigns or workflows.
  • Templates are used only for export formatting (e.g., Pandoc).

Watch

Writing a novel? Give your book a home before it's published — Radial Timeline Community

Ongoing series on the Radial Timeline YouTube channel:

Shorts:

Installation

From Obsidian

  • Open settings → community plugins.
  • Click browse and search for "radial timeline".
  • Click install and then enable.

Manual installation

  • Download the latest main.js, styles.css, and manifest.json from the releases page.
  • Extract the files to your vault's .obsidian/plugins/radial-timeline (may be hidden by file system).

Desktop & Platform Support

Radial Timeline is a desktop-only Obsidian plugin.

  • Supported target: Obsidian Desktop
  • Not intended for: Obsidian Mobile
  • Some publishing and file-reveal workflows depend on desktop filesystem and native shell access

Language Support

Radial Timeline ships complete English interface text and partial interface translations for Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, and German. Missing translated strings fall back to English. Traditional Chinese variants fall back to English until a dedicated Traditional Chinese locale is available.

Privacy & Security

  • No telemetry or analytics SDKs are shipped with the plugin.
  • API keys use Obsidian secret storage when available.
  • AI ships off by default — new installs make no AI connection and transfer no data until you enable Settings → AI → Enable AI LLM features and configure either a cloud provider API key or a local AI server. Existing installs keep whatever choice they already made; upgrading never flips this setting for you.
  • Vault content should only leave the vault when you explicitly use enabled external features.
  • Shell commands are run only to invoke Pandoc (and its LaTeX engine) when you export a manuscript, and to probe for those binaries with which/where during setup.
  • Files outside the vault are read or written only to save exports where you choose and to locate the Pandoc executable.
  • The only environment variable read directly is PATH, used to locate Pandoc. Subprocesses receive a minimal allowlisted environment (PATH, home, temp, and locale/TeX variables) — never the full set, so credentials in your session can't leak to child processes.

See Privacy & Security for the detailed posture.

External Services & Network Access

Radial Timeline may contact external services in these workflows:

  • AI provider requests when you actively use enabled AI features
  • Optional provider/model/pricing metadata refreshes governed by AI privacy settings
  • A version check against the GitHub Releases API runs once at plugin load (throttled to once a day). It carries no vault data or identity; it only compares version numbers so the timeline can show an update indicator.
  • Community mailbox: on a vault connected to the Community, while a timeline is open, the plugin asks the Community about once an hour (and when Obsidian regains focus) whether you have unread replies. It sends the connection's id and secret and gets back counts. Turn it off with Show Community mailbox in Settings → Advanced
  • Community Share calls: once you connect, your Book Manager book titles (or public labels), loglines, and target dates sync to your private My Share list as project shells at every level; report publishing and daily-activity sync are sent only at a sharing level above Private — see Settings → Community

Known Conflicts

Plugin conflicts: If you experience visual glitches or strange behavior (such as the timeline overlapping with other UI elements), it may be due to a conflict with another plugin. Try disabling other plugins to isolate the issue. Please see known plugin conflicts, and Getting help for known issues and where to report a new one.

Technical Notes

The radial timeline is designed for high pixel density displays (around 200 ppi or higher) for optimal visual quality.

  • All Apple Retina displays — 2x pixel density.
  • Recommend Windows systems with 4k displays or higher. (Tested down to 1440p 2560x1440)
  • Tablets.

If you're experiencing visual quality issues on Windows, please check your display scaling settings.

Acknowledgments

Bundled fonts (PDF export)

  • Latin Modern Roman — used for the Signature template.
  • Sorts Mill Goudy by Barry Schwartz — used for the Professional template.
  • Source Serif 4 by Frank Grießhammer — used for the Standard template.
  • Arial — used for the Basic template.

All bundled fonts ship with their original license files in assets/fonts/.

Feedback and Support

Every way to get help is on one page: Getting help, also one click away from GET HELP in the corner of the Radial Timeline View.

  • Quick answers and writers helping writers: the Radial Timeline Community, where writers share setups and answer each other's questions.
  • Private bug reports and help requests: Community Requests (sign in with your Community account). A person reads every request on weekdays; expect a reply within three working days.
  • Plugin bugs on GitHub: the bug icon (Report a bug) in the Radial Timeline and Inquiry views opens the bug report form with your versions filled in.
  • Step-by-step answers: the Guide.
  • Feature ideas: the feature idea form, or share it with other writers on the Community.

Author

Created by Eric Rhys Taylor

Reviewed and approved for the Obsidian Community Plugins directory. Developed with best practices in mind.

License & Intellectual Property

Radial Timeline® © 2025 Eric Rhys Taylor Released under the Radial Timeline Source-Available Non-Commercial License.

  • You may install and use the software for personal, educational, or professional creative work.
  • You may use the software to create commercial creative works such as books, scripts, outlines, and related authored content.
  • Redistribution, public forks, hosted versions, and commercial exploitation of the software itself are prohibited without written permission.
  • Radial Timeline is protected by U.S. Copyright Registration TX0009593938 and U.S. Trademark Registration No. 8,251,843.
  • The Radial Timeline visualization system is the subject of a pending U.S. patent application and is marked Patent Pending.

See the Legal page on the wiki for a plain-English permission table, the License text, and the Notice file.

Disclaimer & Limitation of Liability

This software is provided "as is" without warranty of any kind, express or implied.

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