Supertags

🏷️ Superpowers with supertags

Supertags are at the heart of Tana. You use them anytime you want to define a "something" that you want to keep track of.

• John Doe (is a) #person

• Acme Inc. (is a) #client

• Order new tires (is a) #todo

• This (is a) #meeting

• Jambalaya (is a) #recipe

We call them supertags because they have the ability to give structure and context to any item they're tagged to in the following ways:

• They are templates of structured information. Every time you apply a supertag to an item, it populates with default Fields and Nodes of your choice, to help you organize all important and related information regarding this item. If it is a person, adding a Field for their Phone Number and their Preferred Name might be handy. If it is a todo, you may want a Field with the Due Date.

• They can be tabulated and aggregated in many ways. Tana's powerful search is made for building queries effortlessly as you need them. Sort your #Tasks according to Project they belong to, or Team member assigned to the Task, or Due in the next 7 days. Crowdsource your meeting agenda automatically by allowing all team members to tag items with #weekly-agenda.

You can create a supertag by:

Adding a tag to an item, clicking it and insert fields via the configure panel

Create a structure you want, and launching the command "Create supertag"

Remember to have 📋 Fields in the supertag, not regular content if you want to be able to add values in the tagged node.

To reuse a supertag:

On a node you want to tag, press # and continue to type its name until you find it, and hit Enter.

To remove a supertag:

Hover over the tag and click the x that appears on hover

Go to Command Line > Remove Tag.

🏷️ Supertags typically looks like this:

A good way to check if a supertag is right, is thinking "is a" when adding the tag. Marisha is a #person. Oslo is a #city.

Below are examples of how NOT to do it:

• Supertags #TanaInc

• or

• Recipes from #JaneDoe

Supertag configuration

Extend allows you to use the template of an existing supertag. This supertag will be seen as an extension of the chosen supertag, which will make it appear in searches for the extended tag. For example, a #person can be extended by a #colleague or #author. Searching for #person will return all three but #colleague only returns colleagues.

Show as checkbox gives the supertag a checkbox which can be used to track not checked/checked states.

Done state mapping allows you to map the checkbox states to one or more field values. For example, you have a field that has three Task state options: Inbox, Doing, Done. For "not checked", you want this mapped to Inbox and Doing. For "checked" you want this mapped to Done.

Built title from fields allows you to build the title of the node based on its Fields - just tag a node, fill in the fields, and the item gets its title automatically populated. This is a great way for a team to have a consistent way of writing titles.

Navigation shortcuts is a custom target that shows up when you click on the supertag itself. This gives you the option to go straight to the target. If you have a list of tasks, a list of bugs, or a kanban for your team, it basically works like a shortcut that sends users to a default or custom view of a supertag collection.