historica

Turn prose into a timeline, automatically.
An Obsidian plugin that reads your notes, finds every date with NLP, and renders an interactive timeline - right inside a code block.

_{Real screenshot, not a mock: the note's prose above, the timeline it produced below. More shots in showcase/. The marketing site source lives at website/.}

[!note] These docs cover the redesigned UI shipped in 0.3; the current release is 0.4.x. Desktop only - mobile support was dropped in 0.3.

• User documentation: historica.pages.dev
• API documentation: obsidian-historica-code-doc.pages.dev

Quick start

Create a historica block in any note:

```historica
```

That is it. The block reads the prose of the current file (code blocks are ignored), splits it into sentences, and every sentence containing a string that parses as a date or time becomes a timeline entry.

Languages

Historica is English-first, but it also parses several other languages. By default the language setting is auto: it detects the language of each note and picks the matching parser. Besides English it currently handles German, French, Japanese, Chinese, Dutch, and Vietnamese (English has the richest coverage; the others focus on absolute dates, months, centuries, and eras). You can also pin a language explicitly instead of auto.

Parsing is tested against real annotated corpora - WikiWarsDE, WikiWars-NL, French FTiB, and hand-curated Japanese and Chinese sets. The suites live in __tests__/.

Editing

Every entry expands into a card with a significance slider (1-5), a free-text note, and attachments picked from your vault. Right-clicking gives you two menus:

• On the timeline: sort, expand or fold all entries, re-parse the note, and export (PNG, HTML, Markdown, JSON, plain text).
• On an expanded card: jump to the source sentence, add an attachment, hide the entry, mark it as an anchor, or dismiss a bad extraction.

To reword an entry or fix its date, edit the source sentence and re-parse - or hand-edit the saved timeline file, which is plain Markdown (see below).

Save your plot

A fresh empty historica block is bound to the hidden blockId -1, and blocks with blockId -1 do not auto-save: re-render the block and your customizations are gone. So save the plot:

• Click the save button at the right end of the toolbar (the status beside it reads Not saved yet). The data is written to historica-data/xxxx.md and the generated id is stamped into the block. From then on every change auto-saves.
• Or give the block an id yourself when you create it:

```historica
{
"blockId":"It-is-so-kute-and-I-know-it"
}
```

Now the block auto-saves to historica-data/It-is-so-kute-and-I-know-it.md.

Saved timelines are plain Markdown in the HMD format - YAML frontmatter for settings, one ## heading per entry, inline fields for date and significance. Obsidian can open and even render them directly; you can read, diff, grep, and hand-edit them. The format spec is in docs/hmd-spec.md. Saved blocks are also indexed into the vault-wide Global Timeline view (command palette: Historica: Open Global Timeline).

Install

• Obsidian: Settings, Community plugins, search for Historica.
• Manual: grab main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest release and drop them into .obsidian/plugins/historica/.

License

MIT