Quick flashcards system in Tana

Hello there! Here’s a very quick hack to put together something that looks a lot like a flashcards system. The process is really easy as we only need one field on the flashcard supertag, which I’ll call the “Correct Answer”.

Then, we take advantage of contextual columns and the display options to hide the correct answer and include two columns for Choices and Your Answer. When we switch to a list view, you can see that the first click will show the options and your answer, while a second click will show the correct answer and a third click will close the node. Quite cool!

In my private workspace, I’ve also included a “Topic” field to the card, so I can easily filter and connect with whatever kind of content related to the same topic. For example, I could have a search where I look for #lectures and #flashcards on a given #topic. This shows you just how flexible Tana is.

I would have loved to use the tabs view for this, as I often find it a much more efficient way to display information than a list view. I have been experimenting with different methods to try and achieve the same level of slickness as what you get when using the list view, but Tana simply is not there, yet. That being said, I am looking forward to what the future holds and what new features will be released in the coming months.

Let me know what you think!

Tana 1.32.0.0 Released!

Tana’s latest release includes new features, as well as significant improvements to Tana Paste, Title Expressions, and Node References. Here’s a breakdown.

Today, there are a bunch of new features in Tana! ✨

Most notably, there have been significant improvements to Tana Paste, a specialized format for representing Tana data structures in plain text that enables you to “import” content from other tools.

• You can now add %%search%% to a node to make it a search node (indented search expression underneath).
• You can link to a tag using [[#tag]] (especially useful in search nodes).
• In addition to finding nodes in the library, you can now add a tag to a link to find any node in your available workspaces with that tag, or create a new node with that tag in the library. For example, [[Tana Nodes #team-tana-nodes]] would match my node in the Tana Nodes workspace, even if it is not in the library.
• You can also set the view of a node using %%view:table%%, %%view:cards%%, or %%view:tabs%%.

One of my favorite features in Tana is the ability to build titles from fields. I use this a lot to keep a structured and organized workspace, making it easier to find what I’m looking for.

Today, Tana introduced a new feature: the ability to choose whether you want the placeholder to appear if the field is empty. You can do this by appending a question mark, either ${Field name|?} or ${Field name|30…?}. The 30… indicates that you only want to show the first 30 characters. Pretty handy!

Last but not least, the Tana team addressed a core problem of the super powerful referencing system. In Tana, references are always by ID, not name, so you can end up with multiple nodes with the same name.

You can now put a reference to the node you want to merge nested below the node you want to merge into, or you can move the node itself there. Then, use the Cmd/Ctrl-K Merge node command and choose the node to merge into.

Alternatively, you can select several collapsed nodes that are on the same level and merge all of them into one. You can choose which one to keep.

When a node is merged into another, all its children are combined – if they have the same fields, the children in those fields will be combined as well – and all its tags are combined as well. The original node is then moved to the trash. All references and inline references in the available workspaces are then updated to point to the newly merged node, which replaces the original node. If there are workspaces that had not been loaded during the merge, and which contain references to the original node, these references will also be updated to point to the new node. It is important to note, however, that nodes cannot be merged if they live in different workspaces.