Interface

The sidebar

The sidebar is the main navigation in Tana. It sits on the left side of the screen as a flat list of destinations: Search, Home, Calendar, Work, Spaces, and More. Your own pins sit below them, and the account menu at the bottom. There are no tabs.

The rows above More are places you can be, rather than a list of things the organization holds. More is the index of everything.

On wider screens the sidebar is always visible and can be resized by dragging its right edge. On narrower screens it appears as an overlay when opened. On the calendar and meeting routes it takes a dark theme to match the meeting background.

Home

The Home board. Where you land when you open Tana: the meeting you are heading into, what came out of recent ones, your tasks, and what you have been working on.

Calendar

The Calendar: your meetings as day, week, and month grids. The row stays lit across all three.

Work

Work is the board for what you owe people: ongoing chats, your tasks, your agents, MCP chats, and your Notifications. The sidebar row carries a badge with your unread notification count, because the Notifications card lives here.

The Notifications card shows its most recent entries, with a View N more button for the rest. Notifications cover when someone:

• Assigns you a task. Assigning a task to yourself does not notify you, including when the AI does it while acting on your behalf. Ask the AI to assign a task to someone else and that person gets a notification attributed to you
• Starts a call you are waiting on
• Sends you a chat message
• Archives or restores a type in your organization. The row carries the type's current title, correct across renames, and links to its panel

Each row shows an unread dot before the title, the actor's avatar, and a relative timestamp. Click a row to go to its source, or use Mark all read in the card header.

Urgent notifications, an incoming call being the one that matters, fire outside the app and take you straight to the meeting when clicked: a system notification on the desktop app, and a browser notification on the web. Browser notifications have to be enabled first. The Notifications row in Settings, Preferences shows whether they are on and offers an Enable notifications button, or points you to your browser settings if you have blocked them.

Spaces

Your spaces appear in the sidebar so you can jump to any space home in one click. Each space can be expanded to show the types defined in it. See Spaces.

More

More expands in place rather than opening a page. Under it sit the organization's contents by kind, plus a Library row that opens the full index.

The Library page shows an ordered preview of each category, Spaces · Meetings · Tasks · Types · Chats · Agents · People · Skills · Canvases · Docs, each with a See all link to its own page. Empty categories hide themselves.

A category page shows the category title, a Library breadcrumb to step back out, and an inline search field; section routes (Spaces, Chats, Agents, Skills, Canvases, Docs) also carry the shared Created by and Visibility filter pills, and Chats adds an MCP pill that narrows to chats started from an MCP client. The Types page adds a single-select space filter. The Skills section lists only the skills your organization has authored; Tana's built-in system skills are filtered out.

The Meetings preview defaults to a Recent window, with a dropdown to switch it to Upcoming, Today, or Past. It hides itself when no meetings fall in Recent, but once you narrow to an empty window the header stays so you can switch back.

Media, meaning images, audio, video, and uploaded files, does not appear in the Library, in space browse, or in Search; it still renders inside the chats and documents that embed it. Anything that does not live in a space or on a meeting lives in the Library, and its location pill reads Library. A space home uses the same section index, scoped to that space.

Tasks

Tasks, under More, opens the global tasks view: your tasks across every space, grouped by type and narrowed with filter pills (Assigned to, Created by, Type, Space) that live in the URL, so a filtered view is bookmarkable and Back and Forward step through it. It opens on what is assigned to you, and with no filter set it shows your most recent tasks. See Tasks for how the view works.

People

People, under More, shows every member and group in your organization as a flat list. A Filter narrows it by name, matching a person's full name even when they are displayed elsewhere by a nickname. Each row carries Meet now, which creates an instant 10-minute meeting with that person, Chat, and Create, which opens the create menu scoped to them.

Clicking a person opens their person page: a time-grouped list of everything the two of you share, with Space and Type filters, plus the same Meet now, Chat, and Create actions in the toolbar. Your own page shows Edit profile instead.

Drag a task onto a person to assign it to them.

Pinned items

Below More sits your own pinned area: the items you want one click away. It is private to you, and it renders nothing until you pin something. Documents, spaces, agents, and types can all be pinned here.

To pin, use Pin to sidebar from an item's right-click menu or its toolbar menu, or drag the item onto the sidebar. The submenu offers the top level, any section you have already made, and New section…, which names a new section and files the item into it in one step. An item sits in one place in this tree, so pinning it to a different destination moves it rather than duplicating it.

Top-level pins render as plain rows with no "Pinned" header, and sections group pins under their own header. Drag to reorder pins and sections, to file a pin into a section, or to move one back out to the top level. Right-clicking empty space in the sidebar also offers New section…, and sections can be renamed or removed from there. Right-click a pin to unpin it; unpinning drops the pin and leaves the document untouched, so pinning it again restores it. A pin whose document you have lost access to stops rendering.

The same collection has a full-page view at /pinned, showing top-level pins first and then a group per section, with the same drag-and-drop behavior and a toolbar action to add a section.

You can also ask AI chat to pin or unpin items for you, to your sidebar, to a date, to a space home, or to a meeting everyone in the call can see. Pins apply immediately rather than arriving as proposals, because a pin adds no data and is reversible.

Bottom section

The account menu sits at the bottom of the sidebar: the organization avatar and name, with auth and sync indicators beside them. Clicking it opens settings, organization switching, and sign out.

A ? icon next to it opens Download apps, Learn, Changelog, and Status, each in your browser.

Create menu

The create menu is accessible from the pencil icon in the sidebar toolbar, or from the "+" button on space home pages and on a date. It is a searchable palette with these options:

• Meeting, Doc, Canvas, Task, Chat, Agent, Type, Space, Skill
• Custom types: Any types you have defined, grouped by space

When used from a space context, created items are scoped to that space and the Space option is hidden. Opening it from inside a space and choosing Space creates a subspace nested under it.

Tasks open as inline cards rather than navigating away. Everything else navigates to the new document.

Quick chat

Press Cmd+LCtrl+L on the desktop app to open a quick chat window. Type a message, optionally add participants, and press enter. The chat is created and AI responds automatically.

Press Cmd+Shift+LCtrl+Shift+L to open quick chat with voice dictation active. Your speech is transcribed directly into the message input.

Quick chat is the fastest way to ask the AI anything without leaving what you are working on.

Search

Open search from the Search entry in the sidebar, or with Cmd+PCtrl+P from anywhere, including while editing a document. It opens as a centered dialog, wide enough to show results in the table view, hosting the same browse interface: a search field for full-text search across Tana, the filter bar, and, when you have not typed a query or set a filter, the per-section index. On iPad and other touch devices it opens as a bottom sheet that stays clear of the on-screen keyboard.

What you type searches text as written. Matching a person's name tolerates accents and visually similar characters from other alphabets, so "muller" finds "Müller" and "orjan" finds "Ørjan". The same holds for @ mentions and people pickers.

Auto-filter

An Auto-filter button sits at the right of the search field. Press it, or hit enter, and Tana interprets the sentence into the filter pills below, so "meetings with Jane last week" becomes the Meetings kind plus an attendee and a time filter. Press it again to drop the interpretation and go back to the literal search.

If the sentence cannot be turned into filters, the button offers Try again and your text matches stay on screen. Editing any filter yourself also clears the interpretation and runs the search from the pills alone.

Related documents

Under the direct text matches, a Related group lists documents that are about the same thing without matching the words you typed. When nothing matches literally, that group is all you get, and its heading says so.

Arranging results

• Group arranges results by Type, Status, Assignee, or one of a type's own member fields. Each group collapses, and a truncated group carries Show all.
• Sort orders them by Title (A to Z or Z to A), Created, Updated, or Start time. The table's column headers sort the same way.
• Display picks the Displayed attributes: which of a type's fields each result row shows as a column.

Filters

Search and the Library share one filter bar of round pills. An active pill turns solid and carries an ✕ to clear it.

• Meetings, Tasks, Docs, and Chats: one-click buttons for the everyday kinds
• Type: a picker for anything else, including the types you have defined
• Created by: a people picker, with you pinned to the top as "(you)" and an Anyone option to clear it. It takes more than one person
• Visibility: narrow by who can see an item, Any, Private to you, Shared with you, Restricted, Open, or Anyone with the link for items shared by link

Picking a kind reveals its own sub-filters. Meetings adds When (Recent, Upcoming, Today, or Past) and Attendees, a multi-select people picker that narrows to meetings including everyone you pick. Tasks adds Status, which takes several states at once and reads them back ("Open, Proposed", with Any status to clear it), and Assigned to (Anyone, You, Unassigned, or a specific member).

When the filters narrow to a single type, that type's own fields join the bar as pills you can edit in place, including its Options fields, which offer a checklist of the field's values.

Without a query, the filters act as a browse mode. Narrow to Meetings only and the view becomes a dedicated meetings table (title, the space it lives in, time, attendees, and a lock for private ones), sorted with the most recent first.

Keyboard navigation

Arrow keys move through the dialog as a grid: up and down step through results, left and right cross between the filter pills and the controls on a row. Focus moves in and out of the search field without leaving the keyboard.

Saved searches

A search worth keeping can be saved as its own Search document from the filter row, in search, the Library, and a space's home. Reopen it to run it again, always against what is in Tana now, and pin it like any other document to keep it a click away.

A saved search stores how you had the results arranged alongside the query, so it comes back grouped and sorted the way you left it. Editing an item from the result list, changing its status or assignee, updates the row in place rather than leaving a stale one behind.

The AI can save a search too, and can point you at one that already exists rather than composing a new query. See Search results in chat.

Panel title chip

As you scroll down any panel, a doc, canvas, chat, skill, agent, meeting, space home, and the rest, a compact title chip appears in the toolbar showing the item's avatar or thumbnail and its entity-type badge. Click the chip to scroll back to the top.

Panel back navigation

Each panel toolbar's back arrow walks that panel's own history, returning to the panel you opened it from rather than the last URL you visited. The desktop app uses Back and Forward buttons instead, always visible and disabled when there is nowhere to go.

Settings

Open settings with Cmd+,Ctrl+, or from the account menu in the sidebar footer.

Settings sections include:

• Profile: Your name, display name, and profile image.
• Billing: Your plan, AI credit purchases, and the billing portal. A seat on a trial shows that it switches to the Free plan automatically when the trial ends, with a heads-up before it does.
• Calendars: Connect Google Calendar or Outlook. See Calendar sync
• Integrations: Connect GitHub, Slack, Outlook, Linear, Jira, HubSpot, and your own external MCP servers, so their tools become available in chat
• MCP: Configure AI assistants to connect to Tana
• Coding tools: Choose which coding tools are available to AI chat
• Preferences: The Call Sounds toggle that gates the join, leave, raise-hand, and chat tones in meetings, the Notifications row for browser notifications, the Detect external meetings and Enhanced meeting capture toggles for external capture, and a Tana links row with a Reset for your saved open-in-desktop choice.
• Permissions: On the desktop app, the microphone and system-audio permissions a capture needs
• Organization: Name, default content language, and other org-wide settings. A Logo row uploads a picture for the organization, replacing the generated initials everywhere it appears, including the account menu in the sidebar, which is what tells them apart if you belong to more than one. Admins edit this section; everyone else sees it read-only
• Members: Invite and manage team members (admin only). Each person you invite comes in as a Member or an Admin, and an admin can switch anyone between the two later from the dropdown next to their name. Your own row and the organization owner cannot be changed or removed

The account menu also lets you switch between organizations, view pending invitations, leave an organization, and sign out.

Desktop features

The desktop app adds features not available in the browser:

• Tabs: Open multiple documents in separate tabs within one window. A new tab signs in to the organization of the link that opened it, not whichever organization you used last
• Split view: Work with two documents side by side. Use Cmd+Option+ClickCtrl+Alt+Click on any link to open it in the split pane.
• New window: Use Cmd+Shift+ClickCtrl+Shift+Click on a link to open it in a new window.
• Toggle sidebar: Use Cmd+SCtrl+S to show or hide the sidebar (also under View ▸ Toggle Sidebar). The same shortcut works on iPad with a hardware keyboard. In the browser it stays the page's "Save" shortcut.
• Launch at login: A checkbox in the app menu on macOS, or the File menu on Windows where it reads Launch at Startup, that opens Tana when you log in. On by default.
• Open in Tana: When you open an org-scoped Tana link in a browser and have the desktop app installed, Tana offers to open it in the app, with Open always, Open once, or Continue in browser. Your choice is remembered; reset it from the Tana links row in Settings, Preferences, or from the Always ask where to open button on the hand-off screen. Meeting links are excluded so guests can still join calls in the browser.
• System tray: Your day across every organization you are signed into. See Apps.
• Meeting detection: The desktop app can detect active Zoom, Teams, and Meet calls for external meeting capture.

The sidebar and panel toolbars dim while the window is not frontmost, and return to full strength when it regains focus.

Light and dark appearance

Tana follows your system appearance and renders in light or dark to match. The whole app switches together, so Home, meetings, documents, and chats always agree, and changing the setting on your machine applies immediately without a reload.

Sync

Tana syncs in real time across all your devices. The sidebar footer shows sync status. A cloud-off icon appears if authentication has expired and you need to sign in again. If a connected calendar silently stops syncing, an amber ! indicator with the tooltip "Calendar needs reconnect" appears next to the sync status in the user account row; reconnect from Calendar settings to clear it.