A Fusion 360 add-in that adds a vertical timeline. Works on Windows and macOS, though development and testing happen primarily on macOS.
The palette adapts to light and dark themes, following your operating system / Fusion UI color theme.
Download the add-in from the Releases page.
Unpack it into API\AddIns (see How to install an add-in or script in Fusion 360).
Make sure the directory is named VerticalTimeline, with no suffix.
Once installed, turn the timeline on with File -> View -> Toggle Vertical Timeline.
The timeline is shown using File -> View -> Toggle Vertical Timeline.
- Click an item to select it (this also selects it in the Fusion GUI).
- Double-click the name to rename it; double-click anywhere else on the row to edit the feature/part.
- Right-click an item for a context menu: Roll Timeline Marker Here, Edit, Change Transparency, Rename, Suppress/Unsuppress, and Delete. For an item past the history marker (rolled back), the menu also offers Delete all features after History Marker. Change Transparency (50% / 100%) toggles the feature's bodies between 50% and 100% opacity, like Fusion's Opacity Control.
- Drag the history-marker bar (the line between the active and rolled-back items) onto a row to roll the marker there, SolidWorks-style.
- Cmd/Ctrl-click (or Shift-click for a range) to select multiple items. The selection is pushed to Fusion as a real selection, so you can then run a command such as Mirror on those features. Right-click to Create Group or Suppress/Delete them together.
Selecting a feature in the Fusion GUI also highlights the matching row in the timeline. Items that Fusion reports as errored or warned are highlighted red or yellow, with the message shown on hover. A fully constrained sketch shows Fusion's own lock-badge sketch icon.
The palette shows its own context menu rather than Fusion's native timeline menu. Some native entries — Create Selection Set, Configure, Find in Browser, Find in Window — have no add-in API to invoke, so they are not included.
The add-in can be temporarily disabled using the Scripts and Add-ins dialog. Press Shift+S in Fusion 360™ and go to the Add-Ins tab.
- Improve performance further for very large files. See PERFORMANCE.md for the prioritized backlog.
- v 0.7.3
- The Toggle Translucency context-menu item is now Change Transparency (50% / 100%) with a cube icon, matching the standalone ChangeTransparency add-in.
- Rolling the history marker onto an item inside a collapsed group now lands on that item (the group auto-expands) instead of redirecting the roll to the whole group.
- Selecting a grouped feature in Fusion now reliably highlights its timeline row, even when Fusion's entity token differs between refresh and selection.
- v 0.7.2
- Browser icons load Fusion's high-resolution (2x) artwork, so they are crisp on Retina/HiDPI displays instead of blurry.
- Icons now follow the palette's light/dark theme: each icon uses Fusion's
light-foreground (
-dark) artwork on a dark palette and the normal artwork on a light palette, so details like the extrude arrow stay visible either way.
- v 0.7.1
- The right-click Delete and Delete all features after History Marker items show the red Delete icon again.
- Roll Timeline Marker Here now shows its proper timeline-marker glyph instead of the roll-forward arrow.
- Long context-menu items (e.g. Delete all features after History Marker) wrap instead of stretching the menu across the whole panel.
- Added docs/ICONS.md documenting how Fusion's icon resources are resolved (the Fusion vs Neutron trees and the macOS/Windows path split).
- v 0.7.0
- Draggable history-marker bar: drag the marker (the silver line with the grip on the right, between the active and rolled-back items) onto a row to roll the marker there, SolidWorks-style.
- New Toggle Translucency context-menu item makes a feature's bodies 50% translucent (and back), like Fusion's Opacity Control.
- Fully constrained sketches now show Fusion's own lock-badge sketch icon.
- Fixed the sheet-metal component icon (it had been showing the generic placeholder); the add-in can now load Fusion's SVG-only icons too.
- v 0.6.0
- Fixed group collapse: only the last group's collapse toggle used to work.
- Rolled-back items now offer Delete all features after History Marker in the right-click menu.
- Double-click the name to rename; double-click elsewhere on the row to edit. A single click now selects (and selects the feature in the Fusion GUI too).
- Multi-selected rows are pushed to Fusion as a real selection, so commands such as Mirror can consume the picked features.
- Errored/warned items are highlighted red/yellow, with the message on hover.
- Fixed a crash when selecting a position Snapshot.
- v 0.5.0
- Performance: highlighting the timeline row for the feature selected in the GUI is now a direct lookup instead of scanning every timeline item on each selection change, so large designs no longer stutter on each click.
- Performance: the palette refresh now reads each feature's data once instead of making several redundant Fusion API calls per feature.
- v 0.4.1
- Fixed a crash (error dialog) when closing a pure assembly file, caused by reading a construction plane's definition while the document was being torn down.
- Fixed a crash (
KeyError) when removing a component, caused by the timeline still referencing the component after the parent-component map had been rebuilt without it. - Hardened the palette refresh and click handlers so a design that is momentarily out of sync (during a file close or a mutating command) no longer produces a traceback dialog.
- v 0.4.0
- New right-click context menu on timeline items: Roll Timeline Marker Here, Edit, Rename, Suppress/Unsuppress, and Delete. Right-clicking no longer rolls the marker automatically.
- Select multiple rows (Cmd/Ctrl-click to toggle, Shift-click for a range) and Create Group from the selection, plus bulk Suppress/Unsuppress/Delete.
- Menu items show Fusion's own icons where available.
- Removed the version number from the palette title.
- v 0.3.0
- Updated for the latest Fusion. The palette now uses the new (Qt) web
browser instead of the deprecated CEF browser, with the matching async
adsk.fusionSendDatahandling. Verified against Fusion's Python 3.12 runtime. - Dark mode support. The palette follows the OS / Fusion UI color theme via
the
prefers-color-schememedia query. - Fixed a startup error (
InternalValidationError : pActiveEnvironment) caused by reading the active workspace before Fusion had an active environment (e.g. on the Home screen). - Fixed a crash (
Associated feature is invalid) when clicking or renaming a timeline group; groups and entity-less items are now handled gracefully. - Correctly select and edit primitive features (e.g. Box, Cylinder) inside components by selecting the feature proxy rather than its bodies.
- Highlight the timeline row matching the feature selected in the Fusion GUI.
- Component coloring is now derived from the component name, so colors stay consistent across timeline refreshes and across documents.
- Replaced blocking error message boxes with non-intrusive, auto-clearing status messages in the palette.
- More robust occurrence-type detection (handles component names containing spaces).
- Cache resolved feature-icon paths to avoid a filesystem check per feature on every refresh.
- Map Move/Align features so they get a proper icon and become editable on Fusion versions that expose their entity.
- Updated for the latest Fusion. The palette now uses the new (Qt) web
browser instead of the deprecated CEF browser, with the matching async
VerticalTimeline was created by Thomas Axelsson (thomasa88). The original project lives at https://github.com/thomasa88/VerticalTimeline. All credit for the add-in goes to the original author; this release builds on that work.
It uses thomasa88lib, also by Thomas Axelsson.
This work is dual-licensed under GPL-3.0-or-later OR MIT — you may choose either license. Copyright © 2020 Thomas Axelsson. See LICENSE-GPL-3.0-or-later and LICENSE-MIT for the full texts. The original copyright and license notices are retained in every source file.