Explain the problem as you see it
There are many ways PKM apps have to let you work with several content at the time: Tabs, Sidebars, Panels.
I think Panels are the worst and most limiting, and the way they work in Tana is particularly frustrating. This is because of 2 reasons:
- They are not treated equal, so if you are in a panel and you want to search and switch to a new node you can only do that on the main panel.
- Because their width is not treated equal, so every time you open or close a panel, the width auto adjust and squeezes your content to a point it is not viewable, so you have this constant battle every time you open or close a panel where you have to go back and adjust the width again, it is INSANELY frustrating.
Panels in general are also a bad option because you are very limited in terms of how many nodes you can open, if you start opening several nodes it quickly becomes unusable.
Why is this a problem for you?
Having more than one node open today is a very frustrating experience and this makes me very unproductive.
Suggest a solution
Instead of panels, having a right sidebar, where I can "send" nodes, and they would stack up between each other, and you can collapse them for easy reading.
It would be similar to the current Topbar ("Shift + Click") but this is on a right sidebar and also making the nodes collapsible so you can easily focus on one and then change to the next one.
With this feature you could also have a shortcut to hide the right sidebar, so for example maybe you are working on Tana full screen with the sidebar open, and then you have to focus on something where you have Tana on half of the screen and another app on the other half, so you can easily hide the right sidebar. Then you go full screen again and you bring back the sidebar.
With panels you would have to close everything and then open everything back again. Very frustrating and unproductive.
Another thing that would make this awesome is the ability to pin certain nodes on the sidebar, so if you close Tana and then open it again, those nodes are still on the sidebar.
To have a reference, this sidebar would be very similar to what Roam Research has done. I am not mentioning them just because I miss this feature from Roam, but because I actually think it is really useful and it's really well thought out.
Another option would be having Tabs. I prefer having the sidebar but Tabs would also be very useful and they are something you could implement along with Panels or with the Right Sidebar.
4 Comments
Has my vote, so long as there's a way to toggle the sidebar off completely. Definitely interested in a dockless + paneless + sidebarless Tabs alternative, too.
Back in the 2019-2020 era, there used to be a particular theme in Roam which I thought was pretty amazing. It was panels, but you could pan horizontally (shift-scroll) and when you moused over the page you could also scroll. You could also drag or reorder pages by shifting them side to side.
It would be what I'd call a perfect mixture of "tabs", "panels" and "pages".
It's called Zenithdecker now I think: https://github.com/theianjones/roam-research-themes/blob/master/zenithdecker.css
Design originated from Azlen: https://github.com/azlen/roam-themes
100% support this feature. I find the current panel/dock setup fairly limiting. The way RoamResearch did it was, for me, incredibly productive. You could easily open any node in the right sidepar/panel. They were collapsible, sortable, etc.. You could do anything at any time without moving away from your main content/panel. This helped a lot with navigation and avoiding context switching. I understand it's a personal preference, but this is the biggest thing I miss from Roam, especially now that I can't seem to get stacked vertical panels in Tana's right dock.
How it looked in Roam:
I did like Roam's implementation a lot! But I do like the feature of having more than two vertical panels too. So some kind of a mix of that flexibility.
Roam made it possible to make any node the main node with a click of a button iirc. This is possible with Tana too, but not without losing all other panels.