Week 39/2022 - Help center, elastic state

Elastic state

Today we’ve shipped some improvements to how we work with references and inline refs: https://www.loom.com/share/aff9556537f746e7847773b029118c8a. We are introducing an “elastic state” when you insert a ref that enables you to convert it into an inline ref by typing or by expanding it to add notes about the ref. See the video to better understand how it works.

Over time we have been exploring how to add notes about refs in addition to within refs. It’s been named “associated content”, then “notes” and now “contextual content”. With this change we’ve tried to get away from it being a separate shortcut or a separate concept you need to learn, and instead made it a state in the UI that you get to when @-mentioning or pasting a node, or when doing arrow left at the beginning of a ref or arrow right at the end of a ref.

Help center

We’re launching our brand new help center. You can still find it through the ? on the top right, but it now has a much cleaner look, easier navigation, and significantly updated content. This is an early release - we will continue to add or refine a lot of content over the next little while, but we would love feedback - both about the navigation/layout etc, as well as the content: anything missing, anything unclear?

We already feature some great content from the community, but we would love more! If you have an interesting workflow, setup or tip to share, get in touch.

Better navigation with nodes from tag template

We’ve slowly been improving the way you can work with nodes from tag templates. Because we don’t allow you to create other top level children in between the template nodes, enter at the end of a template node used to insert a node below all of the template content, which was counter-intuitive. With the latest release, we’ve made this better: if you press enter at the end of a template node, it will insert a new child right below, and expand (if the node is collapsed). If you press enter at the beginning of a template node, if there is a template node above, it will expand and a child will be inserted at the bottom. Hopefully this makes working with template nodes easier.

System field for number of links

We now have a system field showing you the number of nodes that link to a particular node. Here's an example of using that with the LINKS_TO operator that finds nodes that links to a particular node, sorting my References to Andy Matuschak according to number of references.

Changes to views

We've changed how we deal with changes to views. You now directly modify all views that live in your private workspaces. For views in shared workspaces, any modifications are only visible to you, until you explicitly choose "Save for everyone". You can also revert your changes, or use the command line/right-click on the node title when zoomed in to Remove all view options.

🐞 Bugs and other improvements:

Cleaned up which nodes are shown in References and searches

You can now group on instance fields as well

A number of bug/performance fixes around search, filtering, grouping and sorting

• searching for a date will now match fields with auto-initialization (CURRENT_DATE_REF)

• better sorting for numbers with decimals

LINKS_TO search operator now supports PARENT and GRANDPARENT

Also some fixes related to showing the keyboard shortcuts panel, and updating the filter state when you remove all filters manually.

New "Daily Tip" popup when you open Tana - easy to disable if you don't want to see them anymore

Hide column in table was sometimes not available

Option to filter by nodes that have no tags (when useful)

UI Polish on context menu and view toolbar menu