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Roam user's guide to Tana

Blocks are Nodes, and Pages are... Nodes

In Roam, every bullet item is called a block. You write these blocks on pages, which can be created by adding a page in All pages menu, or by enclosing text in double brackets [[, which automatically creates a new page when you click on it the first time. Blocks can be referenced anywhere, and in any other page. Pages can also be blocks, which you can reference on other pages. There is a hierarchy between blocks and pages.

In Tana, every bullet item is called a node. Nodes can be referenced anywhere using @-mention or copy-paste. There is no "page" concept in Tana because any node can become a page by clicking on the node icon and zooming into it. You can make nodes more important by doing things like using a supertag, pinning them to the sidebar, or building them out on your home node.

For more, see: Nodes and References

Tags are not Supertags

Roam allows you to add "#" to the front of any word, and this turns the word into a tag, which has its own page that shows you all other blocks that mention this tag.

In Tana, supertags define the type of object a node is.

You can use "this node is a [supertag]", where you replace [supertag] with the name of the tag you're testing out. For instance, consider the content below:

"Pick up tortillas for dinner on my way home"

Now, consider the piece of content as a whole and fill out the sentence:

• "This content is a #task" ✅
• "This content is a #dinnerplans #9-5life #tacotuesday" ❌

Another difference is that a supertag applies to the whole node, not just a word in the node.

And they can be configured extensively to add, enrich and connect information together, almost acting like mini-apps. You can have supertags like #task, #person, #meeting - all within Tana and interconnected with each other so your tasks from your meetings are never lost, and your meetings connect with the people in your graph, and you can see all your tasks per person.

For more, see: Supertags

[[ and (( are @

In Roam, you link to other pages by typing [[. You can link to other blocks by typing ((.

In Tana, type @ to bring up a popup where you can search for any node in Tana as you type.

For more, see: the reference part of Nodes and References

Attributes are Fields

Attributes and Fields are ways to make information structured, i.e. an "Author" field should contain author names, a "Deadline" field should contain dates.

Roam allows you to define an attribute by hitting :: after the attribute name, so Author::Cal Newport

Tana has Fields which you can create by starting any empty node with > and then filling in a field name. Each field can be configured extensively and form part of Supertag templates.

For more, see: Fields

Searching within

When it comes to searching within nested content, there are notable differences:

In Roam, indenting creates containers. If you apply a tag to a parent, all children nested within it automatically inherit the tag. So, you can make a scoped search like "sunshine #journal" and this will retrieve any result with the word sunshine that has or inherits the tag #journal. This assumes that everything nested under the block with the #journal tag is part of the journal too.

In Tana, everything is its own node where child nodes do not automatically inherit attributes of its parent node. It is possible to have nodes nested in each other that are very different in nature, therefore we don't let properties to be inherited like in Roam. Instead, you can run scoped searches on any node you want using the command Search within.

Check out [this future FAQ] for more ways you can search within nested content in Tana.