Explain the problem as you see it
At the moment, it is not possible to write essays, emails, blog posts, or other long-form content in Tana in a smooth way. Although Tana works great for outlining ideas, it would be incredible to have a dedicated mode that allows long-form writing options.
Options such as:
- Headings
- Line breaks
(just these
two things would make a massive difference)
nice bonuses would be: - Quote blocks
- Lists (numbered and bulleted)
Why is this a problem for you?
Since Tana currently lacks support for long-form writing, we are forced to use other tools for writing long-form content.
This makes it hard to continue the work all in Tana. It prevents us from having all research, outlines, and drafts in the same app.
Workarounds
The best workaround so far is Jeff Harris' CSS hack. Which was posted here in the slack community
Edit: Unfortunately that post was lost in Tana's community slack history, and even then that css hack isn't working anymore.
After reading the comments below this post, I wanted to share a bit of how I'm working around Tana's limitations, in case anyone find it helpful, you can see me showing a demo of my current workflow in this YouTube video
At the moment I rely on a lot of workarounds, having a better system built in to Tana to specially allow line-breaks and headings (h1, h2, h3...) would be great.
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While Markdown syntax would be incredible, the most important aspect of this feature would be the ability to easily paste long-form text into other apps like Gmail and preserve all formatting.
Similar requests:
As pointed out below in the comments, there's a similar request here: https://ideas.tana.inc/posts/26-line-breaks-inside-a-node
While that's definitely super useful by itself. I would argue that it's important to go beyond just "line breaks inside nodes" and also have a dedicated "long-form" writing mode that enables not only line breaks but also headings, lists, blockquotes, and other formatting options for an overall better long-form writing experience outside of enforced bullet point structures.
Thanks 
49 Comments
I can see this feature existing outside of the node system (the sacrifice I would accept). Some form of Tana Doc, which can be embedded under the node and function like a page in Notion, Craft Docs and many other apps.
Great. I think future solutions will utilise Tana's model, as opposed to live outside of it
Why not do it a bit like you did the agenda and meeting stuff?
We designate a node with a tag (could be anything, a bit like how you can choose the #person and #meeting tag for the system to recognize).
Once it's tagged appropriately, that single node becomes a long form document, with line breaks and extra formatting abilities. Since it's a single node, it can then be exported easily, no formatting required on our parts.
Crazy how this is still not a thing after a year of being one of the top requests.
And it's still not worked on at all for now, sadly.
This feature is a tie breaker for many people like me. I do not want to get away from tana but would like to see this feature implemented asap.
This feature is only blocker I have in switching to Tana completely from obsidian
I understand the conflict with long-form vs bullet as a philosophy of the app, but as a workaround, allowing a node to include long-form text seems pretty harmless.
We can currently have a node be a code block with completely different formatting than standard nodes. This looks and acts nothing like a "bullet" in the conventional sense, but there it is and the world still turns.
If I were able to "insert" a text "block" and anything I type in there follows a different set of rules (eg. markdown), that would definitely be the bandaid I'd need to use Tana daily.
I get that if your job is to write long-form all day that wouldn't really get you what you need, but at that point the argument of, "you're misusing the tool" holds much more weight (eg. Tana is a screw driver and you are using it to hammer in a nail). No one is literally programming inside of Tana. But, having the ability to enter blocks of code can be extremely useful.
I feel like the easiest way to do this would just be:
!syntax for heading levels.The last thing that would help here, for poets like myself, would just be to make line breaks possible inside any node with shift + enter. Then users can create a "stanza" tag as needed.
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All this would stay in Tana's ethos of being highly composable and essentially allow us to make templates for any kind of document we can imagine.