timeline

A local-first evidence timeline builder for detectives and defense attorneys who currently build case timelines by hand in PowerPoint.

timeline keeps every event in a single plain-text timeline.json file in your working directory. No accounts, no network, no telemetry — your case data never leaves your machine.

Who it's for

• Detectives consolidating phone records, witness statements, camera hits, and dispatch logs into one chronological view.
• Defense attorneys looking for gaps, overlaps, and contradictions in the prosecution's timeline — including sightings of the same person in two places too close together in time to be physically possible.

Install

cargo install --path .

Usage

Create a store in the current directory:

timeline init

Add events one at a time:

timeline add \
  --at 2026-09-18T14:32:00Z \
  --desc "Phone call placed to unknown number" \
  --source "phone records" \
  --subject "Alex Merren" \
  --location "Dockside"

# Plain dates work too (treated as midnight UTC):
timeline add --at 2026-09-18 --desc "Seen near the pier" --source "witness statement #2"

Bulk import from CSV (columns: at,desc,source,subject,location):

timeline import evidence.csv

Show the unified, chronologically sorted timeline with source citations:

timeline show
timeline show --subject "Alex Merren"

Flag suspicious overlaps — impossible travel (same subject at two different locations within a window too short to travel, default 30 minutes) and exact-duplicate descriptions from different sources:

timeline conflicts
timeline conflicts --window-minutes 45
timeline conflicts --mph 55

Coordinates are optional. Pass --lat and --lon on timeline add, or extra CSV columns, and the same command estimates drive time. A pair outside the flat window still flags if the drive does not fit. Confidence is high when the gap is less than half the estimate, otherwise medium. Same place name, ignoring case, is not a conflict.

Export the timeline as a markdown document:

timeline export                 # to stdout
timeline export --out case.md   # to a file

Data model

Each event has:

Field	Required	Notes
at	yes	RFC3339 timestamp or YYYY-MM-DD date
description	yes	Free text
source	yes	Citation label, e.g. phone records
subject	no	Person-of-interest tag
location	no	Place tag
lat / lon	no	Decimal degrees. Optional drive-time estimate only

Roadmap

• Richer conflict heuristics (travel-time estimates, confidence scoring).
• Tauri GUI (timeline-desktop, same local store, no network)
• Windows and Mac release builds (workflow is in, run it when the suite is finished)

License

Apache-2.0 — see LICENSE.

Part of Blackshield Company.