Changelog

Emoji reaction for comments

We're excited to add a much requested feature which is both fun and useful: emoji reactions to comments. Now you don't need to send a comment to acknowledge a proposed solution, just select 👍 and the original comment author will be notified in their Inbox. The whole modern emoji set is available and anyone can join the party 🥳

✨ ProTip: To add emojis to issue descriptions, or to your own comments, just type :emoji-name:

Notifications for closed issues

To make communicating shipped features or canceled bugs easier, we also added two new notifications: completed and canceled issues. Whenever an issue is moved to either status, subscribers are notified.

Other improvements and fixes

• Sidebar's user menu now includes shortcuts to menu items
• Added more billing information including past invoices
• Added ability to create and join workspaces from the command menu
• Added Microsoft Edge as a supported browser
• Improved delivery speed of magic login emails
• Improved GitHub/GitLab pull request processing stability
• Improved GitHub/GitLab terminology in command menu and settings
• Improved text selection and window dragging in several views for macOS application
• Added more information to GitLab integration page
• Several fixes to keyboard shortcuts for Windows and Linux
• Fixed workflow automation for GitHub PRs which were moved from draft to ready for review with an existing reviewer
• Fixed long dash characters in issue URLs
• Fixed Inbox notification checkboxes on Firefox
• Fixed issue ID autolinking when ID was followed by a punctuation mark
• No label filter now shows up correctly
• Fixes bug that hid "not completeled issues during cycle" issues in past cycles

Linear signups are available for everyone!

We're announcing Linear for general availability today. You can sign up yourself as can your team and there's no more need for an invite. We're also announcing pricing plans. Smaller teams can still use Linear for free without limits on users as long as your active issue count stays below 250.

Read our blog post

Ps. We're looking for experienced TypeScript developers and product designers to join our team. Read more here.

GitLab merge request support

We're excited to add support for GitLab. It lets you integrate Linear issues and merge requests with the same functionality as our existing GitHub integration:

• Link multiple merge requests with issues
• Support custom workflows with draft support
• Support reverted merge requests

You can connect Linear with GitLab.com or your self-hosted GitLab installation starting today.

Linear Guide

Linear now has its own documentation site full of information on how to use the product better. We wanted to highlight the most common features and also expose less known ones in case you haven't found them yet. To step up your Linear knowledge, we list shortcuts and ProTips marked with ✨!

Visit Linear Guide

Other improvements and fixes

• New help menu with links to docs, the Slack group and a way to contact us
• Issue list rendering performance improvements
• Automatically login all windows if logging in on one
• Issues created from Slack now support really long titles
• Improvements to archiving teams
• Less aggressive update notifications to the desktop application

Improvements and fixes:

• Added ability to leave and rejoin a workspace
• Added ability to find an issue by its URL
• Improved sorting of users when using filters
• Improved realtime sync notifications
• Improvements to table styling in the editor
• Improved color selection when adding labels through command menu
• Fixed a bug with handling of suspended users
• Background color fixes in desktop app

Hide board columns

Linear's board views now have the ability to collapse rarely used columns. This might come in handy if your team mostly works out of a few columns and would like to hide less frequently used ones.

To hide a column, select "Hide" from the board column's menu. View or unhide hidden columns by scrolling to last column of the board (to the right). You can also drag issues into hidden columns.

Other improvements and fixes

• Issue templates will now include assignee, project and status fields
• Removed "external" label from users and inviting new users is now limited to workspace admins
• Issue filters now supports searching by user's username and full name
• Webhooks for issues now include more label information (ID, name and color)
• Added the ability to search labels and statuses across multiple teams in filters
• Welcome email is now only sent to the first workspace a user joins
• Warning is shown if a user decides to switch workspaces when changes are still being synced
• Fixed timezone issues with project due dates
• Fixes to draft pull request automation
• Fix to arrow keys after writing an emoji in the editor

Support for multiple workspaces

We're adding support for multiple workspaces under one user account. This makes it easier to keep your personal tasks in a separate workspace from your company's workspace or to collaborate with multiple companies without logging in and out.

Teams that work with multiple clients can now create separate workspaces for each client so that their work and access to GitHub are separated.

To create a new workspace, select the option from the workspace navigator which is accessible by clicking the workspace name in your sidebar.

Other improvements and fixes

• New user menu design in the sidebar
• New shortcuts to move issues to top or bottom on the board: OptionShiftArrow Up and OptionShiftArrow Down
• Added edit option to user profile page when viewing own profile
• Several improvements to application loading with new workspace URLs
• Improved tooltips for issue actions in the list
• Invite links are now deprecated and emails are required for inviting users
• Fixed issue history entries for setting zero, or removing, estimates
• Reduced resource usage when the application has been left idle in the background
• Improved performance when selecting multiple issue with ShiftArrow Up/Arrow Down pressed
• Fixed a bug where the favorited page would open as it was removed from the sidebar
• Fixed white background flicker when opening the desktop app in dark mode
• Added header and footer to 404 pages

Setting an issue's status

Linear has supported setting the issue status using keyboard shortcuts for a long time using Command/CtrlOption1-5. This worked fine for teams using the default statuses. However, if a team added more statuses to their workflow, the keyboard commands would only target the first status of each status type (e.g. Backlog).

Linear now has keyboard shortcuts for all statuses of the selected team and you can change the status of selected issues using Command/CtrlOption1-9. Additionally, the multi-select tray now detects if the team has multiple states for the "Move to Backlog" and "Move to Active" actions and will display a menu to let the user choose the state to move the issues to.

Infrastructure improvements

We've spent a considerable amount of time improving our backend infrastructure to support our ever-growing userbase. While this is an ongoing process, we've now completed a major refactor of the service infrastructure that considerably improves the reliability of our backend and lets us scale the application to a lot more users. Not everything went according to plan and we did have a few outages during these migrations for which we sincerely apologize.

Other improvements and fixes

• Google authentication failures no longer block a user, and they log the user out
• Fixed problems with the domain validation emails not getting sent out
• For first logins, the loading screen now uses the users preferred appearance on macOS
• The desktop application now has new windows consider their parent's size and position when opening
• Fixed issue where editing a template would always show an alert when navigating from the view
• Fixes an image missing from the invite email
• Fixes loading of archived issues in certain edge cases
• Fixes an issue with email authentication when already logged in as the same user

Login with email magic links

Until now you could sign up for Linear using a GSuite account and invited users were able to log in using their Google account.

Today we are announcing email login with magic links, which enable you to sign up and log in using any email address. We also removed the limitation where you could only invite external collaborators if they had a @gmail.com account.

Logging in using email magic links is simple. Type in your email and we'll send you a link. When you click the link, you'll be taken to Linear and immediately logged in.

GitHub linkbacks and PR draft automation

We've made a couple of improvements to our GitHub integration. We now correctly handle draft pull requests and there is a new workflow setting to configure drafts.

We've also made improvements to issue links that get posted to pull requests on GitHub. When you update the pull request and link new issues, the links are posted correctly.

Other improvements and fixes

• Lots of infrastructure stability improvements
• Improved GitHub integration stability
• Improvements to comment animations
• Labels are now ordered alphabetically
• Fixes to desktop app window behavior when using them fullscreen
• Fixes a desktop app issue where the login window could be hidden, but not re-shown
• Fixes to desktop app sign in flow
• Made it easier to drag desktop app windows from the issue title
• In My Issues view, Created and Subscribed sections are now sorted by creation date
• Fixed Shift+click to select multiple issues in lists
• Added keyboard shortcut for creating links with Cmd+K
• Improvements to rendering notifications emails on mobile
• Stability improvements for the Google Sheets integration
• Allow all characters to be used in the workspace name
• Fixed an issue when displaying multiple PR labels
• New sidebar header with the workspace name and logo
• We now mark a notification as read when you interact with the issue it relates to

GitHub draft pull requests and issue descriptions

We added support for GitHub draft pull requests in Linear. If you open a draft pull request, which is linked with an issue, it will show up as a draft in Linear. When the pull request is marked as ready for review, it will trigger automation in Linear and move the issue to the in progress status.

Links to the Linear issue in associated GitHub pull requests have also been improved. The pull request link can now be expanded to show the full description of the issues without leaving GitHub.

Subscribe to team/project notifications

Users now have the option to subscribe to all team and project notifications. This should make it easier to triage new issues and manage the overall scope.

• Team: Select Subscribe to team notifications from the command menu (Command/Ctrlk)
• Project: Open projects page and select Subscribe to project notifications from the project card menu

CSV export

Issue data can now be exported in CSV format by workspace admins. You can schedule the export in Import/export settings and you'll be emailed the download link once the exported data is available.

Other improvements and fixes

• Several stability improvements to our API
• Added keyboard shortcuts to move to the beginning and the end of the list with Command/CtrlArrow Up and Command/CtrlArrow Down
• Preference to open external links in new window is now applied to all external links
• Fixed layout issues with resizable sidebars
• Fixed sync issues with cycle and project views
• Fixed issues with online presence status
• Fixed bugs in renaming cycles
• Fixed avatar groups to show the correct amount of users with the active user on top
• Fixed responsive navigation on our homepage

Improved My Issues view

Previously, the My Issues view would display currently active issues that have been assigned to you. By popular request, we improved the view to allow you to quickly display issues that are either Assigned to you, Created by you, or ones you've Subscribed to. Issues on your Backlog will now also be included in the listing.

User online status

User avatars will now show whether the user is currently online, away or offline. The profile page has been updated to show this information, too, and will additionally show the time they've last been online. You can also see this information in a popover when hovering on a user's avatar in the comments section of any issue.

Increased text contrast

We made subtle improvements to contrast and font size in light mode and the emails sent by Linear. The added contrast and slightly enlargened text size improves legibility especially for muted and faded text.

Resizable sidebars

You can now resize the left and right sidebars by clicking and dragging on their edges. Useful for making the most of your preferred window size.

Importers view

To make it easier to discover the ways to import issues into Linear from other systems, we added an Importers page in the the Workspace Settings. Linear currently supports importing issues from GitHub, Jira, Asana, and Pivotal Tracker.

Other improvements and fixes

• Added a new title/identifier configuration option for Git branch names
• Esc now cancels editing a comment
• The Offline indicator no longer gets cut when displayed on a narrow screen
• Issue slugs now look better as they are stripped of some unwanted characters
• Improved shadows for contextual menus
• Fixed occasional flickering in the new user Onboarding flow
• Fixed an issue where an empty comment could be saved
• Fixed file/video upload URLs in Slack notifications

Branch naming

A lot of Linear users have GitHub integration enabled and use our Copy git branch name action (Command/CtrlShift.) to copy the git branch name when starting to work on an issue. We've now added the ability to change the format of the branch name that will be copied. To change it, go to your Github integration settings.

Issue estimation improvements

We made several highly requested improvements to issue estimation. Each of the following new settings can be found under your team settings.

Counting unestimated issues

You can now choose how unestimated issues are counted towards estimate totals. Counting every unestimated issue as 1 point towards the estimate totals makes the most sense for most teams, and this remains the default.

Allow zero estimates

Previously, your issues were either not estimated at all, or you had a positive estimate value. If you want to distinguish between unestimated issues, but still allow issues to not count towards the total estimate for a cycle or project, you can now enable zero point estimates.

Extended estimate scale

All of our estimate scales have 5 values by design. Larger estimates usually mean that there is a lot of uncertainty about the complexity of an issue and breaking the issue up into smaller pieces is usually the best approach. However, if you want, you can now extend the scale and add two more values to the estimates.

Other improvements and fixes

• Comments to issues in reminder emails now include embedded images and are formatted in HTML
• Sync resumes faster when waking your computer from sleep
• Contextual menus now show keyboard shortcuts
• Exact timestamps are now accessible in Issue history by hovering over the entry time
• Fixes to scroll bars on Firefox
• Issues in label views are now sorted correctly
• The issue page is no longer closed when hitting Esc when viewing a fullscreen video
• Reliability improvements to our infrastructure
• Parse and validation errors are now correctly reported in our GraphQL API

Project links

We have added external links to projects. In addition to the project description, they can be used to link to external resources such as designs in Figma, project plans in Notion and so on.

To access project links, visit the project page and open the sidebar (Command/Ctrli).

Other improvements and fixes

• Significant stability and performance improvements
• When the Slack integration access has been revoked or turned off we send out a notification
• Fix to issue URLs containing backtick characters
• GitHub autolinking documentation improvements
• Project team links and issue peek now work better on mobile devices
• Removed team deletion from the command menu. To remove a team, visit the team settings page
• API: Fixed pagination on users query

Cross-team projects

Linear projects are a good way to group issues and add some structure, but until now they were limited to a single team. To support larger organizations, we're rolling out cross-team projects in Linear. You can now see teams on the project's page and add more from the team header, or with "Manage project teams" option in the command menu. Once you added more teams, you can see how much work they have left and toggle between them to see issues for each one of them.

Multi-domain support

Linear uses email domains to map users to their respective organizations. Until now every organization could only allow people from the domain of their Google Suite account. This causes issues for customers who rebrand, change domains, or just want to work with folks from a different domain. Today we're rolling out support for multiple email domains. To enable, organization admins can add new domains in the organization settings.

Default templates

We've had issue template support for a while and today we're extending that with a new premium feature: default templates. In the team's template settings you can now set a template to be the default for all new issues created in that team, for members and non-members respectively.

Other improvements and fixes

• Fix to project target dates
• Fixed issues with label creation
• Improved rendering of cycle burn-up graphs
• Fixes to team navigation
• Fixed sidebar unread count
• Fixes to issue archiving, its child issues are now also archived
• Hide avatars of suspended users when joining a team
• Fixed saving of read states for notifications
• Fixed some typos in tutorial issues
• Fixed moving issues to a team that has archived workflow states
• Now focusing at the end of a comment when editing it
• Settings navigation has a new design
• Team settings sections are now their own pages
• New windows in the desktop application open in the same location as the current window
• Fixes to filtering on the search page

Desktop app improvements: multi-window support

We updated our desktop app (1.2.0) with better window management along with other improvements. Full list of updates:

• Ability to open (Command/Ctrln) and close (Command/Ctrlw) multiple windows
• Support for narrow window sizes
• Better handling of in-app links and Command/Ctrl+click to open internal links in new windows
• Improved handling of closed and minimized windows
• Updated to Electron 8 for improved performance

If you have the app installed, it will prompt you to download the updated version soon. To manually download the app, head to linear.app/download.

Other improvements and fixes

• Increased list performance throughout the application. Hovering over list rows close to edges also doesn't move the list anymore.
• Inbox now supports notification grouping
• Back link in issue views now behaves correctly with sub-issues
• Issue view header now shows filtered issue estimates or counts
• Added support for longer team names
• Added ability to filter views by team
• My Issues view now shows blocking issues at the top
• Cycle views don't show backlog columns anymore
• Project status is now shown in command menu for Add to project and Filter by project actions
• Improved documentation around GitHub issue autolinking
• Fixed pull request link styling in board views
• Fixes to team deletion
• Fixed overflowing project names in projects dashboard
• Fixed screenshot and issue links in Slack notifications
• Fix to profile photo updating
• Fix to allowing copying of issue title on Firefox
• Fixes to certain screenshot aspect rations
• Fix to My Issues shortcut in shortcuts help modal

New projects dashboard

We built projects into Linear to better manage large bodies of work which can span several members of a team. To improve the visibility of projects, we're introducing a new improved dashboard with a card-based design. It makes it easier to see the status of each project in a team and also helps with navigation.

Projects now use a new URL structure which includes the name of the project so that project links make more sense when shared across chat or email. We added link unfurling for Slack to quickly show a preview for project links. It's available for teams that have the Slack integration enabled.

Improved Inbox

We improved the Inbox with functionality that makes it easier to manage notifications. The Inbox now supports bulk actions, so you can select multiple notifications at once and perform actions on them. Notifications for new comments now also include a preview of the content, and you can preview the related issue using Issue Peek by pressing Space.

Other improvements and fixes

• Added new keyboard shortcuts to navigate between parent issues (Command/CtrlShiftArrow Up) and sub-issues (Command/CtrlShiftArrow Down)
• Added new keyboard shortcut for changing the theme (Command/CtrlShiftl)
• Changed team shortcuts to ctrlShift1-9 to prevent conflicts with browser tab navigation on Windows
• Added issue history entries for the blocking and blocked issue when the blocking issue is resolved or when it is re-opened
• Added issue popovers to issue relationship history entries
• Issue boards now include issue relationships (blocked etc.) flags. Badges can now be clicked to change their value similar to list views
• Added issues subquery under issueLabel and issue relationships under issues in the GraphQL API
• Added a prompt for when the user is about to discard comment edits without saving them
• Copy git branch shortcut won't move the issue into In Progress status anymore if it has already been marked as Done
• Fixed issue relationship adding in the new issue compose view
• Fixed issue subscriptions when there are more than one user @-mentioned in a comment
• Fixed two-finger tap to bring up command menu on mobile
• Fixed issue edit mode for issues with "edit" in their title
• Fixed exiting settings with Esc
• Fixed regression in Webhooks which caused newly created notifications to appear with action: update
• Fixed pasting embed URLs with whitespace in them

Issue relations

This week we shipped a highly requested feature - issue relations. With issue relations, you can annotate relationships between issues. We start with three different relationships:

• An issue is being blocked by another issue
• An issue is blocking another issue
• An issue is referencing another issue

Blocking references can be added from the bottom of the status selection in list views and issue detail views, or through the command menu. We also have new keyboard shortcuts to give you quick access to adding and removing relationships:

• m then b - Mark an issue as being blocked
• m then x - Mark an issue as blocking another issue
• m then r - Reference another issue
• Shiftm - Remove a relation

Issue mentions

The editor has also been updated to make it easy to reference issues in issue descriptions or comments. The easiest way to link another issue is to write the identifier of an issue (e.g LIN-123), followed by a space, or copy-paste it. This will immediately turn the text into a link to the issue.

If you don't know the exact identifier of the issue you want to reference, you can bring up a lightweight issue search tool by typing a pound sign (#), followed by the team identifier (e.g #LIN) or search term (e.g #design). This will bring up a dropdown menu that you can use to select the appropriate issue.

Other improvements and fixes

• Added hover popovers for users, issues, projects and cycles in the issue history
• The project due date now works correctly in all timezones
• Titles in the issue board are now truncated beyond 2 lines on supported browsers
• The project editor now validates input on the client-side and enforces max lengths for project descriptions
• Fixes to recursive redirects for issues whose title only contains special characters
• Fixes to title input validation for GraphQL endpoints for creating and updating issues
• Fixes to the description of issues created from Slack
• Fixes to infrastructure when dealing with large application loads
• Fixes the cycle and project links in the issue details for mobile devices
• Clicking on the title of issue lists will now bring up the navigation options as a small command menu instead of a big one