Thymer Weekly - 2026-01-10
A look at the latest Thymer App news from the past week.
Hi Everyone,
Welcome to the inaugural post of Thymer Weekly — your place for the latest updates on Thymer.
I was hoping to release this last week, but failed, so here we go. I am still playing around with the layout and sections, so there may be changes in the coming weeks
In the three weeks since the Alpha was made available, there has been a lot of chat and updates, so to not make this edition too long, I have focused on a few main topics. For more, please see the unofficial Discord.
Changelog
A number of updates are coming our way in the upcoming release, including:
New features:
Change your Thymer icon (Useful if you have multiple PWAs installed)
Keyboard navigation for opening inline refs, refs, and URL links
Copy as reference and copy as transclusion keyboard shortcuts
Shift+Enter transclusion hint in status bar
Shift+wheel horizontal scroll support
Copy to text/markdown/html with improved formatting and reference handling
Better HTML/markdown export for copy/paste
Improved transclusion handling: syntax highlighting on undo/redo
@linkto query to find all items referencing a page
Gallery cover image selection from file/image fields
Verilog and VHDL syntax highlighting support
Additional icons: hanger, sock, shirt, keyboard, mouse
Unbind shortcuts functionality
API:
PluginRecord.getAsMarkdown()
CollectionPlugin.customizeRecordTitle()
PluginProperty.choiceLabel
PluginPluginAPI.previewPlugin()
PluginPluginAPI.discardPreviewPlugin()
PluginPluginAPI.savePlugin(), saveConfiguration(), saveCode(), and saveCSS()
Async setters for PluginLineItem
SDK: Markdown export dev tool example, Claude demo
And plenty of bug fixes. Great to see so many updates being implemented.
Dev Chat
How to pronounce the Thymer?
Let’s get to the most important point first - how do we pronounce Thymer?
A few suggestions were made, including:
Thai-mer
Thy - mer
Thy-murr
Thigh-mer
Thee-mer
Tim-mer
T-EYE-mer
Timer
Wim stepped in and sorted us all out.
Thymer -- noun
Pronunciation: /ˈtaɪ.mər/ -- t-EYE-mer
Etymology: From thyme (”herb nobody knows what to do with”) + -er (”device that pretends to organise your life while you ignore it”)
I’m still in the Thigh-mer camp, though.
What’s Next
The rough road map for the next few weeks is:
bug fixes
working through the most important smaller feature requests
quality of life improvements; sanding. the little things that are annoying and that people run into daily
touch / mobile improvements (long way to go; just the most annoying things first)
desktop app (all 3 platforms)
more API hooks
Some great stuff coming!
Wim Showing off?
Here I am vibe-coding a plugin to get a URL and paste it into Thymer, and he is off chatting with Claude like there is no tomorrow in a “quick prototype where Claude Code talks directly to offline workspace data stored in the browser DB”.
No need to add insult to injury by adding the “quick”. :)
Cannot wait to get my hands on this. I have been using Claude Code with some of my Obsidian notes and have found the insights and responses fascinating, and I would love to do the same in Thymer.
Importing
For those wondering about importing notes from other apps, the devs are aware this is needed and are thinking of the best way to deal with this - “nothing concrete yet but I think we’ll build some scaffolding so people can make/adapt importers/exporters very easily”
Multiplayer
I was surprised to read that multiplayer wasn't tested as much as expected by the devs. I suspect this is partly due to the app's current alpha status (even though, to me, it is well beyond an alpha categorisation) and the current invite-only approach. I think as the app matures a little more and the doors open to more users, more and more people will make use of the full features.
Community Chat
Organising Data
With the current structure / layout of Thymer, it will be quite easy to reach a point when the left sidebar is crammed with collections, so Dave tweaked his approach and commented;
Just because I know you all care, I've decided not to create a new workspace to accommodate my many collections. Instead, I'm trying to cram as many Views as I can into as few Collections as possible. So far, it's going well, but it's quite a bit of work. It will be worth it. I like a small sidebar.
Dave - we do care. And I like this approach. I think it comes down to playing with Thymer and seeing what works for you. I was thinking of creating a collection of Authors, another of Work Colleagues, and another with my enemies, but after starting, I realised these are all people, so I could just use a Person collection and then slice and dice the views as I want.
Multiplayer Mode
Ready posted a really good question regarding access to Thymer in a multiplayer mode.
I have:
My personal Thymer workspace
Business A workspace with Person A and me
Business B workspace with Person B and me
As I understand it,
Business A needs businessa.thymer.com
Business B needs businessb.thymer.com
Separately, I will keep mypersonal.thymer.com
I want the "organisation" level to be separated by the domain name, and then I want to invite my personal Thymer account to each business. Each business uses its own business domain emails. How should I handle this?
It turns out you can invite yourself to a new workspace, which makes this much easier than I expected.
When it asks for an email address and password, you can just type the same email address and the same password as your existing account. Thymer will link it up automatically, so next time you log in using that email address, you’ll see a list of all the organisations you’re part of.
Generate Page/Parent Node Title from Properties
A request was made to enable the page title to be a subset of properties in a collection:
Suppose I have a collection of people and record their first and last names as separate properties to sort and filter by these values. It would be nice to be able to generate the title for the page or parent node for an item within the collection by simply filling in the property values.
>Title: {First Name} {Last Name}
>First Name: John
>Last Name: Doe
Response from the team: There's an internal API which already does this, we just need to rewire a few things to make it part of the public API so that you can use it in your collection's custom code. The Journal plugin does this for example, where the title for each "day page" is set automatically. The idea is that you can then do something like getTitle(record) { return record.text("First Name") + record.text("Last Name") }”
Staying With Current App or Move to Thymer?
This week, a few users who tested Thymer decided to stay with their current apps but will keep an eye on Thymer. This is completely understandable, and to give some context, these were the main reasons provided:
As of now, I am finding it really hard to be a [Rxxx] replacement... I will have to adapt a lot of things... It is definitely not an outliner (though I am sure it will improve a bit) and it is not a markdown editor.. If you use [Rxxx], I am sure you do a lot of linking and block references, and it is so easy and smooth to add and edit them..we will struggle here... but it is very early, I am sure a lot of things will improve
There are too many factors that can't compete with my workflow and I'm not even sure it ever will.. Maybe a drastic change in point of view and functionality draws me back here.
So I finally got to test Thymer and... it's not really my thing, I prefer the Logseq experience. I feel like i know pretty fast if i fit with a software or not. No specific claims, just try my daily workflow on it
I enjoyed checking out Thymer, but ultimately I decided on Logseq. One thing I wish Logseq DB had that md and Thymer have is block columns.
The main complication seems to be that users coming from a pure outliner, like Logseq, Rxxx (sorry, no free advertising if you block me on social media) or Tana, are missing some of the fundamental outline experiences not (hopefully, yet) present in Thymer. This was always going to be a bit of a risk when trying to combine outline and full form text in one app.
There has been a lot of discussion on backlinking / inline linking, transclusions, tags / supertags / powertags, so it will be interesting to see which path the developers take. But one thing is for sure, they are listening to all comments / feedback - “thanks for all the (outliner) feedback, we definitely want to get this right!”
To accommodate everyone, do the devs need to implement some of the critical outliner features and maybe move away from their envisoned model, while users of these tools need to be a little more open to the Thymer model? Interesting conundrum the devs have on their hands.
Alpha Invite Codes
If you've got this far and are still waiting to try Thymer, you are in luck. The devs gave me a few invite codes to access the Alpha version:
https://thymer.com/alpha to sign up and get started.
THYMER-DBNYPRV9
THYMER-WXSKZHJ6
THYMER-NCKG4SJ5
THYMER-8FMXTPTQ
THYMER-N1JL4W7L
THYMER-X7HYW2FF
THYMER-GXBJKSQ4
THYMER-14Q1HGNJ
THYMER-ZBM5WFX7
THYMER-QTJRMXVS
Enjoy! I certainly am.
Plugins / Themes
A preview of some of the Plugins and Themes that people have already created in the short space of time since the Alpha release.
Theme Architect (Link) - a powerful, real-time CSS editor for Thymer. It allows you to use a live IDE-style CSS customiser to help fine-tune colours for your thymer experience and comes preloaded with some themes to get you started
Catppuccin Mocha Theme (Link)
SyncHub (Link) - SyncHub is a plugin orchestrator that automatically brings your external data into Thymer. Instead of manually copying issues, highlights, or calendar events, Sync Hub connects to your favourite tools—GitHub, GitLab, Readwise, Google Calendar—and keeps everything in sync. Your issues appear alongside your notes, your highlights flow into your knowledge base, and state changes propagate in real-time.
AgentHub (Part of SyncHub) - AI chat plugin that can turn Thymer into an AI-native workspace. Context aware and can use multiple providers: Anthropic, OpenAI, Ollama, and other Custom models.
YouTube video embed with linkable timestamps (GitHub Link next week after a few improvements and tweaks)
Quick Capture to Journal (Link)
Todoist Quick add command plugin (Inbox only) (Link)
Media Tracker Plugin (Link) - A Thymer collection plugin for tracking books, movies, and TV shows with custom views and automatic metadata fetching.
Word count in status bar (Link) - displays a permanent word count in the status bar. It simply tracks the total number of words in the current note. It doesn't count selections of text (perhaps this is for the next version!)
Save to Thymer (Link) - Plugin to save web pages to Thymer collections with custom templates and property mapping. It works fine for me, but it's vibe-coded, so any improvement would be appreciated.
If you mess things up when playing around with Themes or Plugins, you can use Safe Mode from yoursite.thymer.com/diag.html. This will disable custom themes and plugins temporarily so you can undo whatever you did.
For full disclosure, just like plugins in other apps, you need to be careful with what you do.
The devs commented that a malicious plugin could access all data in your workspace, and a plugin can connect to the internet and do whatever. When you install plugins, that's how it is, and we cannot make a security layer that detects nasty behaviour. We plan to have a plugin gallery inside Thymer at some point, and then we'll review the plugin code and make sure there is no funny business. But that also means plugins can only get updated after we've found the time to review the changes, and that's slow. so for the time being, I think plugins are going to be kind of a wild-west environment.
But thankfully, Thymer is sandboxed, so if you run a plugin in a “fun” account, it won’t be able to touch anything else.
Closing
Not so much directly related to Thymer, but JD made an interesting comment on the potential future abilities of AI - How much better will agents be 6 or 12 months from now? Will people just use ChatGPT for everything in 6 months? AI agents as personal assistants that remember everything, organise everything, sort everything, act proactively, and manage your calendar? In essence, will Thymer and the rest of the PKM apps still have a place in the market?
This got me thinking about my use case. Would I want AI to have access to everything about me and all my notes and thoughts? I mean, Google already knows everything about me and what I do, where I go, what I am writing etc., so if they could organise everything and keep things updated, it may not be a bad thing. The flip side is that we lose another piece of our ability to think and do stuff on our own. For now I am more than content with Thymer.
On that note, thank you very much for reading and being a part of Thymer Weekly. This is much appreciated. See you next week.