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, the timeline opens automatically whenever a Design is active.
The timeline opens by itself. Closing it with its window X hides it for the rest of the session; it comes back on the next Fusion start (or after reloading the add-in). To turn it off for good, disable the add-in in the Scripts and Add-ins dialog (Shift+S).
- 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, Rename, Suppress/Unsuppress, and Delete. For an item past the history marker (rolled back), the menu also offers Delete all features after History Marker. Right-clicking a sketch adds its native options too (Show/Hide, Look At, Redefine, display toggles, etc.).
- 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 (in the native timeline or the browser) also highlights the matching row in the timeline. Clicking geometry in the viewport does not: Fusion reports the selection as a face/edge, and its API exposes no way to find the feature that created it (see Known limitations). 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.
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Clicking geometry in the viewport does not highlight the creating feature's row (#14). Fusion's API gives no way to map a picked face/edge back to the feature that created it, and scanning every feature to find out would reintroduce the #9 freeze. Selecting the feature itself — a native-timeline row, or a sketch/plane/component in the browser — does highlight the row.
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A few feature types show a generic placeholder icon instead of their real one (#8). Fusion sometimes hands a feature back with no concrete type information to pick an icon from (seen on some mesh, Scale, and Modify features; inconsistent — the same kind often comes through fine). No API workaround exists. Affected rows log
no icon resolved for feature type '…'to the Text Commands console. -
Some edits on large designs (roughly 1000+ timeline nodes) are still slow (#10). Reading the timeline has no bulk accessor (~6 ms/item), so a full re-read of a large design takes several seconds with Fusion frozen. Since v0.7.10 the common operations — roll, suppress/unsuppress, rename, sketch edits, and adds at the end — reuse cached timeline wrappers and refresh in ~0.25 s instead; deletes, mid-history inserts, reorders, undo/redo, and document switches still pay the full read (in theory, an unrecognized reorder could also show a stale row order — no known way to trigger it, and it self-heals). Details and the Autodesk API wishlist: PERFORMANCE.md.
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Deleting a group whose contents feed later features fails from the add-in (#25). The group-delete path calls
deleteMe()directly instead of routing through Fusion's native Delete command the way ordinary deletes do (#20), so it silently declines when a member has downstream dependents instead of showing Fusion's confirmation. Workaround: delete the group from Fusion's own timeline. -
Deleting a rolled-back feature whose entity is an
Occurrence(e.g. Create Components from Bodies, New Component) fails from the add-in (#24). A rolled-back row has no computed entity, so there's nothing valid to hand Fusion's selection/delete API — confirmed even a rawTimelineObjectis rejected. Ordinary (non-Occurrence) rolled-back features delete fine. Workaround: delete it from Fusion's own native timeline. Wishlist for Autodesk: let the delete API accept an uncomputed/rolled-back entity.
Full history: CHANGELOG.md.
The original VerticalTimeline was created by Thomas Axelsson (thomasa88) and lives at https://github.com/thomasa88/VerticalTimeline. All credit for that 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.