Timelines Studio

What Is Timelines Studio?

Timelines Studio is a free, open-source desktop app for creating interactive, customizable timelines. Built for worldbuilding, history, research, and any project that lives on a timeline, Timelines Studio lets you build detailed chronologies on a visual canvas. You can place events at specific points in time, draw spans across periods, and layer eras as background context, and then organize everything with groups, tags, and linked notes.

Each timeline has a configurable start point, end point, and detail level, covering any scale from a few days to billions of years. It runs fully offline and stores data as .timeline JSON files on your machine.

What Is Timelines Studio For?

  • Mapping the history of a fictional world or campaign setting
  • Visualizing historical research across long periods
  • Planning story structure or character arcs over time
  • Tracking project timelines or personal history

How Does It Work?

Timelines are built from three element types:

  • Events - a single point in time
  • Spans - a named period with a start and end; can branch off and merge with each other to show diverging and converging threads
  • Eras - large-scale categorizations that group spans and events into broader periods

Groups layer elements into separate lanes. Tags let you filter and color-code across the whole timeline. Notes attach Markdown documents or MediaWiki links to any element.

Timelines is open source. Feedback and contributions welcome on GitHub.

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