The Timeline Problem Every History Enthusiast Knows Too Well
You've been there. You're deep in research, trying to understand how events in ancient China relate to developments in the Mediterranean world. You open your timeline view, and... it's a mess. 3000 BCE sits miles away from 1900 CE, separated by an ocean of empty space you have to scroll through. Events from different regions stack on top of each other, overlapping until they're unreadable. The connections you know exist—trade routes, cultural exchanges, parallel developments—are completely invisible.
This was exactly the frustration that sparked the creation of LoomView. The original developer, posting on the ObsidianMD subreddit in late 2025, captured what thousands of students, researchers, and history buffs had felt for years: standard linear timelines just don't cut it for comparative history. They needed to see what was happening in India at the exact same time as Rome, without notes overlapping or getting lost in a single vertical list.
What emerged from that frustration wasn't just another timeline tool. It was a completely different way of thinking about historical visualization—one inspired by the ancient technology of the handloom.
From Handloom to History: The Core Concept
The brilliance of LoomView lies in its simple but powerful metaphor. Think about a traditional handloom: you have the warp (the vertical threads held taut on the loom) and the weft (the horizontal threads woven through them). The resulting fabric shows patterns and connections that wouldn't be visible in just the warp or just the weft alone.
LoomView applies this exact principle to history. Time becomes the warp—the vertical grid that everything hangs from. Geography becomes the weft—horizontal lanes representing different regions, civilizations, or themes. A note about "Julius Caesar's assassination" sits in the "Rome" lane at 44 BCE. A note about "Ashoka's reign" sits in the "India" lane at roughly the same time period. Suddenly, you can see them side-by-side without any scrolling.
But here's where it gets really interesting. The original post mentioned something crucial: "Hovering over a note highlights every other event connected by the same historical figure across all lanes." This isn't just spatial organization—it's relational visualization. If Alexander the Great appears in your Greece lane and your Persia lane, LoomView shows you that connection instantly. It reveals networks of influence, migration patterns, and cultural exchanges that traditional timelines bury.
Why Traditional Timelines Fail Comparative History
Let's break down exactly what goes wrong with standard approaches. Most timeline tools—even the good ones—suffer from what I call "linear tunnel vision." They're fantastic for showing the sequence of events in one place or about one topic. The American Revolution? Perfect. The progression of Roman emperors? Great.
But try to compare the American Revolution with contemporary events in India under the Mughal Empire, or developments in China during the Qing Dynasty, and the system breaks down. You end up with what the original poster described: "a massive, empty scroll" between distant time periods, and overlapping notes when time periods are close.
There's a deeper problem too. Traditional timelines prioritize chronology over connection. They show you what happened when, but they don't show you how events in different places might have influenced each other. They don't help you answer questions like: "What technological developments were happening simultaneously in Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley?" or "How did the Black Death affect art in Italy versus England?"
LoomView addresses this by making simultaneity visible. The horizontal lanes keep different geographical contexts separate but parallel. Your eyes can scan across lanes at a particular point in the time grid and instantly see what was happening everywhere at once. It's a small change in perspective that creates a massive shift in understanding.
Setting Up LoomView: A Practical Guide for Obsidian Users
If you're using Obsidian for your history notes (and honestly, you should be—it's perfect for this kind of work), getting started with LoomView is straightforward. First, you'll need to install it from the Community Plugins section within Obsidian. Search for "LoomView"—it should be right there as of 2026.
Once installed, the real work begins: structuring your notes. LoomView works best when you're consistent with your metadata. You'll want to decide on your lane structure early. Are you organizing by civilization? By geographical region? By theme (politics, art, technology)? The original discussion suggested geography worked well for their history notes, but your mileage may vary.
Here's my recommended approach: use YAML frontmatter in your notes to define the key properties. At minimum, include:
date:(using a standardized format like YYYY-MM-DD, or just year for older events)lane:(your geographical or thematic category)people:(a list of historical figures mentioned)tags:(for additional categorization)
For example, a note about the construction of the Great Wall might have:
---
date: -214
lane: China
people: [Qin Shi Huang]
tags: [architecture, military]
---
This structure is what allows LoomView to do its magic. The date places it on the time grid. The lane determines its horizontal position. The people field creates those hover-highlight connections across lanes.
Advanced Techniques: Getting the Most from the Loom Metaphor
Once you have the basics down, you can start exploring LoomView's more powerful features. The connection highlighting is just the beginning. Many users in the original discussion were experimenting with different lane configurations for different purposes.
One historian I spoke with uses a dual-lane system: geographical lanes on top, thematic lanes below. So she might have "Rome," "China," and "Mesoamerica" as her geographical lanes, and "Agricultural Developments," "Trade Networks," and "Religious Movements" as thematic lanes below them. This lets her see not just what was happening where, but how different types of developments interacted across regions.
Another power user treats lanes more flexibly—they're not always geographical. For a project on the history of mathematics, his lanes are "Greek," "Indian," "Arabic," and "European." He can trace how mathematical concepts traveled and transformed across these cultural contexts, seeing transmission paths that would be invisible in a standard chronological list.
The hover highlighting feature has surprising depth too. It doesn't just highlight exact name matches. Through Obsidian's linking system, if you have notes that reference each other, those connections appear too. So if your note on "Roman Aqueducts" links to a note on "Archimedes" (who influenced Roman engineering), and your note on "Syracuse" (where Archimedes lived) is in your Greece lane, hovering on the aqueducts note will highlight the Syracuse note. It becomes a visual representation of your knowledge graph.
Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them
Like any powerful tool, LoomView has some learning curves. Based on the original Reddit discussion and my own testing, here are the issues people encounter most often—and how to solve them.
Problem 1: Lane Overload. The temptation is to create a lane for every little thing. Soon you have 20 lanes, and your screen is a cluttered mess. Solution: Be ruthless. Start with 3-5 broad lanes. You can always create different LoomView instances for different projects or time periods. Sometimes less really is more.
Problem 2: Date Format Confusion. BCE/CE dates, approximate dates ("circa 500 BCE"), date ranges—these can confuse the visualization. Solution: Standardize. I recommend using negative numbers for BCE (so 500 BCE becomes -500) and positive for CE. For approximate dates, pick a single year and note the approximation in the note content, not the date field. For date ranges, use the start date for positioning.
Problem 3: Connection Overload. When you hover over a note about a major figure like "Alexander the Great," every note mentioning him lights up—which might be dozens. This can be overwhelming. Solution: Use tags to create connection categories. Maybe have people:alexander-military for his battles and people:alexander-cultural for his cultural influences. Then you can filter your LoomView to show only certain connection types.
Problem 4: Performance with Large Vaults. If you have thousands of notes, rendering them all in LoomView might slow things down. Solution: Use Obsidian's native search in combination with LoomView. Create a search for lane:China date: -200..200 to show only Chinese notes from 200 BCE to 200 CE, then visualize just those in LoomView.
Beyond History: Unexpected Uses for LoomView
While LoomView was born from historical research needs, its applications are much broader. The core idea—visualizing items across two dimensions (time and category) with relational highlighting—is useful anywhere you need to compare parallel developments.
Project managers are using it for product development timelines. Different lanes represent different teams (engineering, design, marketing), and the time grid shows sprints or quarters. Hovering over a feature launch highlights all the related work across teams. It's a better Gantt chart.
Authors are using it for novel planning. Lanes represent different character arcs or plot threads. The time grid represents chapters or story timeline. They can see at a glance when character arcs intersect, or if one plot thread has been neglected for too long.
Even personal knowledge management benefits. Imagine lanes for "Career," "Health," "Relationships," and "Learning." Plot significant events in each. Hovering over a job change might highlight related notes about stress (health), networking efforts (relationships), and new skills learned (learning). You see patterns in your own life that a simple journal would never reveal.
The beauty of tools like Obsidian is that once you have a flexible visualization method, creative minds will find applications the original developer never imagined. LoomView's loom metaphor turns out to be surprisingly universal.
The Future of Knowledge Visualization
LoomView represents something important in the evolution of how we interact with information. We're moving beyond simple lists and linear sequences toward tools that help us see relationships and patterns. The original Reddit post got hundreds of upvotes and comments because it tapped into a deep need: we don't just want to store information, we want to understand how it connects.
As of 2026, LoomView is still evolving. The community discussion mentioned feature requests like timeline scaling (so you can zoom in on dense time periods), better handling of fuzzy dates, and integration with other Obsidian plugins like Dataview. These will likely come with time.
But more importantly, LoomView points toward a future where our tools match how our minds actually work. We think in networks, in comparisons, in simultaneous possibilities. Traditional digital tools force information into linear formats. Tools like LoomView—built by users to solve their own real problems—break those constraints.
Getting Started with Your Own Loom
Ready to try LoomView? Don't overthink it. Start with a small project—maybe comparing three civilizations during a specific century. Set up your lanes, tag a few existing notes with the right metadata, and see what emerges.
The initial setup might take an hour or two, but once you see events from different places lining up side-by-side, connections highlighting as you hover, patterns emerging that you'd never noticed before... well, you won't go back to regular timelines.
Remember what the original developer said: they built this because standard tools "weren't cutting it." That's the spirit of the Obsidian community—and of effective knowledge work in general. When the existing tools don't solve your problem, you adapt, you customize, you build. Sometimes you end up creating something that solves the problem for thousands of others too.
Your history notes—or project plans, or novel outlines, or personal reflections—are waiting. The loom is set up. Time to start weaving.
