Santi Younger
Long-form writing in Tana
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 