Vision & Philosophy

The vision: empower the Obsidian community to see their notes on a timeline — with professional-grade Gantt visualization and solid, everyday scheduling — while staying true to what makes Obsidian Obsidian: file-first, local-first, and yours.

Your data never leaves your machine. No account, no sync service, no cloud, no telemetry. The chart is just a lens over plain Markdown notes you already own — readable in any editor, backed up however you like, and yours to keep for decades.

Why notes?

I've always preferred the note as the fundamental unit of information. A note naturally carries both content and metadata, and it invites rich association — links, properties, context — in a way a row in a database never quite does.

That belief is exactly why I use, and have contributed to, the excellent TaskNotes plugin: it treats each task as a real note, with real frontmatter, living in your real vault.

And that same idea is the quiet architectural constraint that makes this Gantt possible. Because a task is a note with metadata, the chart has a clean, honest data source — no hidden store, no separate database, no lock-in. Just your notes, drawn on a timeline. Leveraging notes-with-metadata isn't a limitation here; it's the powerful constraint that lets the Gantt read your vault directly.

Alignment with TaskNotes

TaskNotes Gantt is built as a companion to TaskNotes and shares its philosophy wholesale. TaskNotes is deliberately file-over-app: every task is a Markdown note with YAML frontmatter — fully readable, portable, and entirely local. This plugin inherits that stance completely. It adds a visualization layer; it never adds a wall around your data.

To learn the task model this Gantt is built on — what a task is, scheduled / due dates, blockedBy dependencies, statuses — see the TaskNotes documentation. It's the system of record; the Gantt just draws and edits it. (See Core Concepts.)

The long game

The direction I care about:

• Co-evolve with TaskNotes and with the community, deepening the timeline over time rather than sprawling sideways.
• Honor open standards — the plugin maps its scheduling and dependency semantics to the iCalendar RFC family (RFC 5545 / 9253), so your data means the same thing outside this plugin as inside it.
• Grow the standalone side so that, eventually, anyone with dated notes can get value from the timeline — TaskNotes installed or not.

For an honest word on how fast any of this moves, please read the short Development Cadence note. 💜