nikken koura

Explain the problem as you see it

When collaborating on a project it may be good to not just edit a node, but write a comment about it, so that other people will see this comment and work on it

Why is this a problem for you?

• When adding comment, don't want to clutter the actual document we're collaborating on

Suggest a solution

• Create a new node type: Comment.

• It can be edited only by author.

• Comment nodes are indented under the commented one, just as regular nodes.

• Comment's node icon — an avatar of comment author.

• You can use all magic of Tana in the comment: add live searches showcasing the idea or giving a reference.

• You can have discussions under the Comment node just as new Comment nodes.

• We can also move this Ideas Forum there to make it more actionable and collaborative. I love the granularity of content in Tana → it makes it perfect to give a specific comment about a particular part, and is very inviting.

Explain the problem as you see it

I often open Tana when I want to write down some thought and Tana opens on some random node I was editing before. I can't start writing my thing right away.

Why is this a problem for you?

1. I need to do some manual steps to start writing this node. E.g. find "Today node" in sidebar and then click on blank space and then do Cmd+. to zoom in.
2. I see a bunch of stuff unrelated to what I wanted to focus on initially.

Suggest a solution

1. One partial solution is Quick Add but it doesn't work if you want to solely focus your attention on the new node and want a zoomed mode on it. When you do Quick Add you then need to do Search to find this node and zoom into it.
2. One partial solution that doesn't work for me is "Show today node" command, but it only opens today node in right panel. And so I still need to do 1. Focus Today panel. 2. Create and zoom in new node

I suggest 2 solutions:

1. Add command "Open new node in Today" that will focus onto this new node immediately.
2. Allow to zoom into node you're writing from "Quick Add" panel.

Explain the problem as you see it

I have a tag "#quote" that collects quotes from what I read.

I love to visually separate quotes from other content, to make it more aesthetic and fell the particular way, like quoting, not writing my own thought. I do it by italicizing full node name.

However, I have to manually apply supertag and italics.

Why is this a problem for you?

• do the same work twice
• this can be automatized and kinda not interesting to do
• if I have multiple "formatted supertags" I need to properly remember how to format each one
• if I want to change the formatting in the future, e.g. make quotes not only italic but also bold, I need to do the search and reapply formatting to all nodes. it's easy be can be automatized easily also

Suggest a solution

Allow to specify node name formatting, the same way we format regular text.

For example, add B I U buttons near the supertag color selection.

in the future, it can be extended not only to node names, but to supertag fields also. e.g. if I want to render all "topic"-s of my "book" bold, or hihghlight the muscle names with blue color.

Explain the problem as you see it

1. I sometimes write down a note and then think "it seems I wrote something similar 2 weeks ago, but I don't know exactly how to search for it".

2. Categorizing all the stuff you put in a system can be quite challenging — "is this node about AI or AI safety or ". It feels like forcing to structurize everything is very unnatural.

Why is this a problem for you?

I feel overwhelmed by the need to properly tag and connect all my notes. It's difficult to express every workflow I would use in a structured system (with fields and tags) and choose what parts of the node should be promoted to be a part of structure that will be used in search and what is "just content".

Suggest a solution

What we should do is to emerge structure from data. E.g. we can auto-tag nodes based on content or—better, as I see it— create a powerful search/connect tool that will organize nodes by demand with the structure I want. Like

• "Find all nodes that can help to answer the following question: will AGI destroy the humanity"
• "Find all nodes with content similar to this"
• "Find all nodes about cooking".

So we'll not need to waste hundreds of hours finetuning our tagging/topic system but rather just type in the queries we need right now and use the results.