Thymer Weekly - 2026-01-17
A look at the latest Thymer App news from the past week.
Hi Everyone,
We are back with another episode of Thymer Weekly. Let’s see what is in store for us today.
Changelog
A good few things have been implemented in Thymer over the past week or so, including:
search history (local)
pinned searches (sync between devices)
MANY unicode localisation improvements. definitely not perfect yet, but it’s a start
F2 rename improvements in sidebar
Focus issues when reloading plugins
Inline references
Selection collapse fix when navigating with arrow key
Show/hide page properties and show/hide journal query in command palette (and fixed animation glitches and other smaller stuff)
Performance improvements
Also, the devs commented that the following improvements should be with us relatively soon:
List property types (yay!!) - likely end of the month / early Feb.
Paste markdown
Desktop app
“Multi properties", for example, multiple people in an "attendees" property field or multiple hashtags in a hashtag field or multiple links in a links field. Planned. coming either in the next weeks or otherwise by Feb.
Outliner functionality improvements.
API - 1) events firehose. With this, plugins can watch for changes and respond with changes of their own. 2) moving subtrees (will allow you to sort (direct) child nodes)
Table inside a note - not available yet bit it is on the list. It may be a while before the devs get to this, though.
Dev Chat
How do the Devs structure their notes?
The devs chat a little about how they structure their notes in Thymer:
In our Thymer, we have pages where we put ideas for projects, when we plan to do them, and what they involve - high-level stuff. This is essentially shared context, but we also have a personal journal that is a place for our incomprehensible scribblings, and that’s what gets the most daily use.
For me, the journal is a place for the things I plan to do, the things I have done, and the things I don’t want to forget. I’m not ideological about this. I like writing things down because it helps me figure out what my actual thoughts are. Indenting gives structure. I like being able to browse through my journal to see what I planned to do but didn’t get around to, but this is how I use thyme,r and it’s not prescriptive with regard to tasks. I think it’s useful (again - personal) to distinguish between
milestones (weeks/months)
projects (days to a week or two at most)
projects get split up into manageable chunks
small day-to-day stuff
Small stuff gets a checkbox, larger stuff probably ends up in a collection with a kanban/cards view. Stuff in the middle, it depends.
How Devs Track Bugs
If you are interested in knowing how the devs keep on top of bug issues and feature requests, here it is:
We track Thymer bugs, of course, in Thymer ourselves, assign them, plan them, and have notes about them. But it's not public.
The Discord bugs section is useful, I think, because it gives us an idea of which bugs people care about and a discussion section where people can explain what they like/dislike. But Discord is not a bug database - and I personally don't think it should try to be one either. I think it's a good place for people to discuss, organically, about what they like/dislike, and then we will incorporate that the best we can into Thymer.
Pricing Talk
There was a little bit of chat on Thymer pricing, and although nothing has been confirmed yet, it provides an idea of what the devs are thinking/the conundrums they are facing:
The problem with pricing is that the moment you put a price on the website blogs/reviews/journalists etc. all the talk will be about the price, compare it to the prices of other products, etc. I think the conversation at this stage should focus on the potential Thymer has and the direction it can grow in.
The popularity of an app/tool is important because if we have a lot of users, then we have many options to make them work as a business. If thymer turns into an enthusiast niche product, it’s much harder. We’ve self-funded development for years now, but we’ll run out of money eventually, so we have to balance enthusiast appeal, broad appeal, business appeal (maybe?) and more. Requires some delicate decisions.
Devs = Machines?
JDand Wim have been very active on Twitter, Discord, updating Thymer, and coding, so it feels like they never rest. JD mentioned “now it’s 24/7 thymer for me, but this pace is not sustainable, so I’ll probably keep more human hours soon. probably.”
As much as I love the updates and social presence, I think they should take a bit of a rest now and again - obviously only when Thymer is complete.
Community Chat
Plugins
This week, there was a lot of chat about features, potential features, and tweaking things, and it seemed that every response/solution was “build a plugin”. I think I can understand that for some personal functionality/wants, like being able to see the journals in a certain way, or importing Thymer becoming your financial planner, it makes sense, but not for basic PKM stuff like aliases, title formats, backlinks, transclusions etc. I am not suggesting this is what the devs are saying, just my point of view.
Anyway, aside from that, I think a really cool thing about Thymer is the ease of transforming the data to make it work for you. I love seeing my weekly journals side by side to glance at what I was up to, what happened and any key takeaways. With Thymer and a few prompts, I was able to achieve just that and published it here in case anyone wants the same.
Would I want this to be a core feature? Maybe, but with the power of Claude Code or whatever other tool you use, a few prompts, some copy and pasting, you can tweak the plugin to make it your own.
For example, you may not want a 3-day view, but a 5-day view. Simple - copy the code, ask your LLM to amend the view from 3 to 5 days, paste it back in, test, and you are done.
Slowly, I think I am coming round to the idea of the plugin functionality - especially for relatively simple things like viewing my data in a different way that works for me.
Vague Dates
In board/kanban views, it is possible to have fuzzy dates nowadays. You can mix finite planning (specific days or weeks) with vague planning (sometime in February to March etc.) like in the below example.
Did the devs also give away that the plan is to make self-hosting available by the end of Q1? Pressure is on, Wim.
Stress Testing Thymer
T mentioned that they “imported 2-3k pages and have not seen any slowdown. The only time it slowed down was when I imported a 90k-word book, but once it got pasted there was no slowdown at all”
The plugin they used is listed below, and it is great to see that even with 2,000-3,000 pages, there is no slowdown at all in the app. As soon as the journal pages are tweaked to make importing from other tools easier, I am sure more people will give this a shot and push Thymer to its limits.
Fingers crossed, no slowdown at all, no matter how many pages you have.
The flipside is that there can be edge cases/certain circumstances that cause some problems.
Phil mentioned …I’m definitely noticing a significant difference in loading times the last couple of days, Just opened and closed my PWA Thymer and the spinner went for 7.5s before the app loaded.
I am almost 100% sure it's because of my trash folder (which has multiple test imports of my Obsidian folder before I set up a test workspace)... I think this because when I expand my trash folder the whole thing slows down a tonne.
Hopefully, we can get that magic empty trash button soon. Although not too sure how this will work with the version history.
Unlinked Mentions/References
Several PKM tools now offer unlinked references, which was the top of the discussion this week.
Which Ready summarised wonderfully:
I view “unlinked references” more as a built-in quick search in the backlinks area.
If I have a collection page under contacts labelled John Doe, I can @link to John Doe all over the place. But if I’m in a meeting and skip the @ reference and I get a match to John Doe that wasn’t @linked, it would show in an “unlinked references” area. That’s not useful for me in the sense of, “Oh no! I must add a link!” (though if there was a “batch add links” button, I would certainly push it when I stumbled upon it). It’s useful for me in the same sense that backlinks are useful to me — to see any previous references to that person/thing in the past at a glance without having to run a search myself.
I think limiting to the actual title of the collection page (and any aliases, assuming some support for that arrives in some way) would be certainly fine and still beneficial.
I would absolutely love an unlinked references section - makes life so much easier and also gives you peace of mind that should you not link the person/place/topic/reference, you will easily find it again when you navigate to that page. If not, you will be more anxious about ensuring you are linking everything diligently rather than taking notes.
State of Thymer - From a Pure Outliner User
Sticking with Ready, who was on a roll this week, I think he expertly summarised the lay of the land of Thymer from a Tana/Logseq/other pure outliner tool.
Here [in Thymer] you probably won’t find a new way to structure your thinking. In some ways, Thymer is far less complex than Tana. It leans on Workspace > Collection > Page > Block for structure. In Tana, everything is a node. In Thymer, blocks live on pages that live within collections that live within workspaces. It’s “folder-based” / tree-oriented thinking in that sense. You’ll lose the fluidity of supertags and just tagging a node and getting all your fields, etc. You won’t be able to just write stuff wherever you want. There’s still a day page (but only a day page, no weeks or month structure to interact with). And you’ll generally need to be more thoughtful about “This is a thing that belongs in this collection” when you’re writing, though working strictly from the day page is still an option.
What you’ll gain are: two incredibly responsive devs, E2EE, offline and local first, a plugin SDK that lets you do literally anything you want with the app (essentially all of Tana’s long-standing gripes were resolved in the first few days via the plugin SDK by community members), a very fast editor that mixes outlining and long-form (though, I think it gets outlining only 80% correct so far, but the devs actively want to hear from outliners to improve this), and lots more. But yea... Google Calendar sync, Contacts sync, GitHub issues, Readwise, web clippers, integrated AI, custom themes, word counters, pomodoro timers, and so much more were all just layered on top via the plugin SDK within days. The API landscape and possibilities in Thymer is night and day to Tana’s. The underlying data structure is quite different though, and takes some thinking on.
Let’s also not lose sight of the fact that Thymer has been open for testing for about 3 weeks now, so I am sure more things will come soon.
Joke vs No-Joke
This one here could go into either bucket, but there was chatter about including a few fun/teasing things in Thymer, with JD commenting, “I’m always tempted to put jokes and such into my software, but the problem is sometimes software lets people down. bugs, crashes, other stuff, and at that point a cutsey joke isn't funny anymore.”
I kind of agree, and it is a fine balance. But since Thymer conveys robustness, security, ease of use, and the fountain of our knowledge, it may be best to keep the humorous stuff for Discord/Twitter. Or create a plugin that injects some fun code into the app - it may crash or not, and you need to find out where the problem is, following a string of fun clues. A kind of “light” ransomware attack.
Plugins / Themes
A preview of some of the Plugins and Themes that have been created/updated. Just remember, it may be wise to play around with some of these in a test/play workspace before bringing them into your main one.
Weekly Journal View - Want to see your weekly journals side-by-side in a 7-day or 3-day view - easily done with this simple plugin.
Thymer Import - Currently mainly for Obsidian. It basically sticks all your vault into a single collection, which you can then move/integrate/copy and paste from more easily working from just the one app
Broadcast Plugin - Demonstrates the WebSocket API for real-time messaging between users. Adds a “Say Hello” button to the status bar
Thymer-Scratchpad-Categorize - custom collections for Thymer that uses AI to categorise any note I make. Demo
Thymer-Google-Drive-Previewer - allows you to preview Google links inside of Thymer. Demo
Choose Your Own Adventure - being developed. Definitely looking forward to this.
Closing
One of the things I really enjoy about Thymer is that it gets the critical things right. Sync, for example, you type notes on one computer, move to the other, and everything is there. No need to mess around with other apps or worry about it not appearing. You type, forget and go.
On that note, thank you very much for reading and being a part of Thymer Weekly. This is much appreciated. See you next week.