Everything starts at ⌘K

What Orbital is

Orbital shows your Tana as one fast outline: a title, then rows. Every line you see is a node in Tana. You type straight into it, with no edit mode and no save button, and Orbital writes each change to Tana as you go. Changes made in Tana, or by your colleagues, show up here the same way.

It is built for the keyboard. Every feature is a row in the command palette, ⌘K, so there is one place to find anything and a key for whatever you do often. The mouse works too, but you never need it.

Signing in

The first time you open Orbital, the page is a welcome that teaches the one key you need. The big ⌘ and K keycaps sit in the middle like a planet, with Tasks, Meetings, Notes, People and Inbox in orbit around them. Hold the keys and the keycaps go down with you.

Log in with the keyboard

The two steps under the planet are the whole lesson: press ⌘K, then ↩. While you are signed out, the palette lists Log in to Tana first, so ↩ runs it. Tana's own login opens, and once you are in, the window fills with your work.

A grey line across the top of that window says Passkeys aren't supported yet: sign in with your password and 2FA code.

Prefer the mouse? After 15 seconds a Log in to Tana button fades in under the steps.

Only the login works until you are in

Every other row in the palette stays in its place, greyed out, so you can already see what Orbital offers. None of them runs until you have signed in. A window with several panes shows its first page alone until then.

Log out

⌘K Log out of Tana (under Settings) asks once more on a page of its own. Log out ends the session in every Orbital window until you log in again; Cancel or esc steps back.

The window at a glance

A window holds one or more pages, side by side as panes or stacked as tabs. Out of the box it opens on the Work View: the Timeline on the left and My Tasks on the right. Here it shows a task on the right instead.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

1. The window's header The house opens the Work View, the eye shows or blurs sensitive items, ⌘ opens the palette and the question mark opens the Help tour. Each acts in the pane you are working in.
2. Tabs Each page has a tab that names it. Drag a tab to move the page, or close it with its ×.
3. The page's buttons Back, Forward, the page's switches and its ⋯ menu. They show while the pointer is over that page, and each tooltip names its key.
4. Panes Pages sit side by side. The chapter on windows and panes covers splitting, tabs and floating.
5. A view The Timeline: today's tasks, meetings and what changed. Chapter 5 reads it row by row.
6. The title The page's name, or the node you zoomed into. On a document you can type in it; a task shows its checkbox before it.
7. Rows Every line is a node. A marker sits in the gutter and children indent under a thin guide line.
8. Create new The round corner button. Hover it and the words slide out; see Create new below.

With one page in the window, the page's buttons sit in the window's header instead of a tab bar. There is no footer or status line: the title says where you are, and Back walks your history.

The Help tour

This manual lives one row further down: ⌘K Open Manual, under Help. About Orbital sits in the same group and lists the website, the licence and what Orbital is built with.

Orbital on your phone

Orbital on your phone puts your Timeline, saved searches and Quick Add in your pocket, over the same Tana. Press ⌘K and pick Install mobile app: it opens the Help tour on its last page, which the tour also shows by itself the first time you sign in. At the top, pick your phone, iPhone or Android, with a click or with ← and → once the choice has the focus; the page below shows the one you picked.

• iPhone (picked to begin with): a beta in Apple's TestFlight, for iOS 26 or later. Scan the code with the iPhone's camera, or open testflight.apple.com/join/wgcnRVKx on it, and TestFlight asks to install the app.
• Android: Android 10 or later, installed with Obtainium, a free app that installs apps from where they are released and keeps them up to date. Get Obtainium, then scan the code with the phone's camera: it adds Orbital to Obtainium, which installs it and offers every new release as an update. Or download Orbital-android.apk from the link and install it by hand. Until a release has the Android app, the page says it is coming soon.

There is no iPad version. On your iPhone walks through the app once it is installed; the Android app has the same screens (Android).

The loader and rows that arrive

Rows that arrive or leave

Once a page is settled, a row that arrives, because someone assigned you a task or a filter now lets it in, glows once. A row that leaves flashes as it goes. A row whose words change while it stays is updated in place without a flash, so a colleague typing does not light up your page. Very large changes, more than 25 rows at once, are not animated at all.

Notices, errors and the login line

Orbital reports back at the foot of the window, above everything else, and gets out of the way again.

• Notices confirm what you did: "Link copied", "Added 3 items to Today". A newer notice replaces the one showing.
• Notices about one node, such as the task Quick Add Task just made, stay a little longer and open that node when you click them.
• Errors are the same toast in red. Nothing else interrupts you: there are no dialogs to dismiss.

When Tana needs you to log in again

The one message that stays is about your session. When Tana asks for a new login, a red line appears under the page title with a Log in to Tana link. Your pages stay readable meanwhile; click the link, sign in, and the line goes.

Create new

The round button in the window's bottom-right corner makes something new. Hover it and the words Create new slide out beside the glyph. A click opens ⌘K Create new … for the pane you are working in: a Task, a Meeting, a Chat, a Canvas, or a document of one of your workspace's types.

Each asks for a name, and ↩ makes it and opens it. A Meeting asks one more thing first: when. It offers Now, for 30 minutes, or the time you type, and makes nothing until you press it.

The button hides while you are signed out, and sits under the palette's shade while a palette is open.

Drop an image on it

You can do the same without dragging. ⌘K Process image works on the image row under your caret, and Process image from clipboard appears whenever you have copied an image. The Create new … page leads with it too, and so does Quick Add Task (⇧⌘Space), where ↩ with no title typed processes the clipboard's image.

Keys in this chapter

Every key Orbital knows is in the keyboard reference.