I just felt the biggest reason why I would like to have an easier way for long form writing, strictly meaning multiline nodes.
It’s because there is no way to tag many nodes at once in a good fashion.
I would love to create taggable content without the “title node” or without tagging each line of the text. I would like to tag whole “block” of that text, like:
- multiline poem → #poem,
- draft of an email/response to question for my online course → #draft,
- block of text ready to be copied and pasted somewhere else, without “-”, only with simple /newline characters/.
Totally agree.
I would like to add that adding the ability to tag many nodes at the same time is not a sufficient workarround.
A single multi line node is not the same as multiple nodes writen one after another.
Sometimes, multiple lines add up to a whole, and each line only makes sense as part of that whole.
Every time a line is tagged, the other lines should be tagged as well. Every time a value is writen to a field of a line, the same value should be copied to the sme field of all other lines. Every time a line is referenced, the other lines should be referenced as well, and the reference should be ordered one after the other exactly in the right order.
An example:
An explanation that includes a diagram. In many cases, the explanation is structured in the following way: a simle explanation of the idea, a diagram, and then further elaboration. Right now, this explanation is forced to be split between at least 3 nodes, even though it is a single explanation. If I want to reference this explanation, I can't, I can only reference parts of it. I am forced to either reference all the nodes that the explanation contains and order them correctly, or reference only one node and hope that everyone looking at the reference will understand that it's partial and that they need to look at the original node.
I also agree that having a "title node" in the cases I presented is also not a sufficient workarround.
Some things don't have a title. I find that forcing the users to title things creates what I like to call "Title Hell", where you write everything that you want, but you are not finished because you cannot find an appropriate title for it.
It is frustrating, and it makes you resist writing, because you know that after you are finished with writing the things you acctualy want to write, you also have to do "chores" and choose a title for it.
And the worse part is that ussually the titles are worthless. You never use them when you search for what you wrote. And they convey so litle about the accual content that you have to constantly alias then whenever you use then as a reference anyway.
Adding to the long form, multiline text tagging.
It would be very useful to be able to tag group of nodes OR a multiline text, with a way to add fields to them, like:
[["Treatment of atrial fibrillation includes:
.> Topic:: Atrial fibrillation
[["What about:
.> Student:: Mark Cuker
.> Date:: 2023-10-29
"I just felt the biggest reason why I would like to have an easier way for long form writing, strictly meaning multiline nodes."
This is exactly my issue.
While I would also like formatting of long form text per the OP, this is the most important issue for me.
It's driving me crazy that I can't write notes and tag the entire "paragraph" or "page" or list of nodes. Here is an example:
I have a input from a user study. I wrote the note, but I can't write each separate input point in one giant paragraph. Of course I need separate lines for each point. But, I don't want each input point to be tagged individually. They make no sense unless they are part of the whole.
I want to find the entire note with the intro paragraph and all the "points" (nodes). They are one whole. But I can't do this with Tana.
Nodes are great and important. But, of course, we need to be able to look at, and act on, a set of nodes (i.e., a page) as one entire unit.
If Tana doesn't support this, then they are letting the backend data structure dictate how users think and use Tana. That would not be good for the long term.
This is exactly what is stopping me from using Tana as my repository.
Thanks for listening!
cheers,
c-