TimeLineEditor (TiLiE)

TiLiE is a local browser editor and visualization tool for musical timelines represented by the Python timetoalign library. Its canonical document is a TimeSkeleton document: timelines with exact rational coordinates, child offsets, conversion maps, regions, flow control, measure maps, and metric hierarchies.

Status: alpha. tilie-server 0.1.0 installs from PyPI, serves the bundled editor shell on 127.0.0.1 with a fresh token for each run, and reports its health; it does not edit anything yet.

Today, TiLiE is an application shell. It serves a browser page with Arranger, Inspector, and Diagnostics panes plus a server-health readout; the local server exposes /api/health. Editing, loading documents, layout, and export are not implemented yet.

Install

pip install tilie-server
tilie

tilie chooses a free loopback port, starts the local server, and opens the browser. Use tilie --check to verify an installed distribution. tilie --port 43129 selects a port, and tilie --no-browser starts without opening a browser.

Status

The server binds only to 127.0.0.1, creates a random bearer token for each run, rejects foreign Host and Origin headers, serves the bundled application, protects /api/health, and sends Referrer-Policy: no-referrer with every response. tilie prints and opens http://127.0.0.1:<port>/#token=<token>: the token travels in the URL fragment, which the browser never sends to the server. The editor reads it, removes it from the address bar, and displays the health response. The token is held in memory only, so reloading the page loses it; restart tilie for a fresh URL.

The six application packages currently establish boundaries and build tooling; their exported behavior is intentionally minimal. There is no TimeSkeleton editing core, document loader, renderer, command implementation, writer, CRDT store, OpenAPI client, or export endpoint yet.

Architecture

TiLiE keeps a small browser editing core and treats the local Python server as an equal peer for loading, computation, and exports. TimeSkeleton data remains exact and schema-validated, while screen geometry is derived from that data. The package structure prevents UI dependencies from leaking into the document core. Read the architecture guide for the complete design and the distinction between current behavior and intended behavior.

Development

Clone the repository, then install and validate the application workspace:

git clone https://github.com/TimeToAlign/TimeLineEditor.git
cd TimeLineEditor/app
pnpm install
pnpm lint
pnpm typecheck
pnpm test
pnpm build

Set up, test, and build the server separately:

cd ../server
uv sync
uv run pytest
uv build

The server wheel bundles the built app. From server/, uv run tilie --check --static-dir ../app/packages/editor/dist checks a development build. From the repository root, python3 scripts/check_versions.py --tag v0.1.0 checks that a release tag matches both declared versions.

Releasing

Release preparation, version checks, the tag-triggered workflow, and PyPI trusted publishing are documented in CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

TiLiE is released under the MIT License. It depends on the timetoalign library, which is distributed separately.