New updates and improvements to Linear.
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If you're new to Linear and are coming from a different issue tracking application, we're working on making it easier to import your existing data into Linear.
You can now quickly import your issues, labels, projects, epics, and more from Jira, GitHub, and Clubhouse directly into your Linear workspace. If you are an admin, visit your workspace's import settings to get started.
We are continuing to work on this feature to make it more robust. We're also considering adding support to import issues from other applications. If you have feedback or a feature request, please share it with us in Slack or via the Help + Feedback modal. In the meantime, you can still import issues from Asana, Trello, and Pivotal Tracker with our command-line tool.
We want to allow you to view your issues in a way that fits your workflow, which is why we added View options and Views. To further improve this, we have added the option to group issues by status (default), project, priority, estimate, assignee, cycle, or no grouping.
Grouping is available on single-team list views, for both default views and custom ones.
Linear's Google Sheets integration is now available for all customers. Previously limited to Standard and Plus plans, we decided to make it available for everyone as we want even smaller teams have access to all integrations. Sheets integration syncs your issue data into a Google Sheet document periodically which allows for easy creation of custom analytics in the most common programming language out there–the spreadsheet.
This week we're adding more options to our webhooks which can be used to build realtime updating applications on top of Linear's API. Previously we sent updates for all of a team's issues and comments to registered webhooks. This was wasteful if the developer only cared about issues and not about comments. Now you can select which resource type change notifications you want to receive. But wait, there's more! We have added more update types: issue labels, comment reactions, cycles and projects. Webhooks can now also be named to make them easier to identify.
We're working on more API-related updates and would love to hear your feedback in the #api
channel in our community Slack.
User
(teams
) and Team
(users
) to make it easier to get lists of teams and their usersWe made small but meaningful improvements to how GitHub automation changes are handled inside Linear. As we allow admins to enable the GitHub integration for everyone, we didn't know which GitHub user matched which Linear user before. With other integrations we're able to match users via email, but with GitHub, many have their accounts under their personal email addresses. To solve this, we now use both issue assignees and past GitHub pull requests to intelligently match users to their pull requests for Inbox notifications. We have also updated issue history to correctly show GitHub as the source for status changes.
restore
type for unarchived events. We also cleaned up webhook payloads to match our GraphQL API responsesTo improve managing your notifications, we added the ability to use CmdF to search the notifications. This also works in issue, roadmap and projects views.
Another week is around and this time we have a bunch of bug fixes and general product improvements.
We've added advanced authentication controls for our customers on the Plus plan. With this feature, workspace administrators can restrict which methods users can use when logging in.
For example, an administrator can now require all members to login through Google in order to access their workspace. This in combination with our support for SAML on the Plus plan makes it easier to control access for larger companies.
New advanced authentication controls are available today on the Linear Plus plan.
We added options to download and copy image URLs from issue descriptions. This makes it faster to share assets or bug reports with your team. In addition to the new options, we made several small improvements to displaying images, especially larger images in the issue view.
We updated Linear's OAuth provider to automatically redirect users to the provided location if they have previously approved access for the application with the same permissions (scopes). This makes it easier and less confusing to use Linear OAuth as an authentication method for your application. On each authorization, a new OAuth access token is created. If a user has more than 10 tokens for the same application and permissions, old ones are automatically revoked, so you'll want to update the user with the latest token.
projectCreate
mutation doesn't require color
attribute anymoreAs the end of the year draws to a close, we looked back at how much the product has evolved over the last twelve months. We take pride in building a high-quality product and try to make sure that the things we make are solid, for all our users. Even so, we still have a few bugs that haven't been fixed.
So to set us up for the new year, we did some house cleaning. Rather than starting to build a new feature, we rounded up some bugs and quick fixes that would improve the quality of the user experience. We added them to a project called bug week that the team worked on together. The work we did will make sure that we can keep moving quickly and deliver a product that we are proud of in 2021.
Here's a list of things we did:
To help give a holistic picture of what is new in Linear, we created a new Linear Release page which highlights new features as well as major improvements developed in the last six months. The theme for the second half of 2020 was to improve the core experience of Linear. We launched easy list selection, view options, custom views, SAML SSO, themes and more.
Today, we’re announcing that we’ve raised USD 13M in Series A funding led by Sequoia Capital. We worked with Stephanie Zhan and her team on the seed round and are excited to partner with them again in this next phase of the company. Our mission is to re-envision the principles and practices of software building and make it feel magical again. Tools should fit seamlessly into your workflow and help you execute faster, collaborate quickly and focus on work. The next generation of startups is building their products on Linear and this funding helps us level up Linear to support them even more.
Read more about the investment in our Medium post.
Setting direction is one of the most important things you’ll do when building a product and company. You can now organize your projects under milestones by enabling Roadmap in your workspace settings. Once enabled, you can create milestones that are shared by all teams in the workspace and associate projects with these milestones, essentially creating a prioritized roadmap of projects.
Additionally, we've redesigned the team projects views as lists to make it more glanceable and consistent with the rest of the application. You can define the project lead and members of a project now as well, to communicate project ownership to the rest of the company.
We design Linear based on the principles and practices we use in product development. Today, we're sharing our first in-depth post on the Linear Method which is, unsurprisingly, about roadmaps: what they are, how you can use them, and why they're so helpful for building high quality products. People often ask us how we use Linear at Linear, so we explain how we use roadmaps, too. Read it here.
To make it easier to build integrations on Linear's GraphQL API, we added a new authentication method, OAuth2. Unlike previous personal API keys, OAuth2 makes it easier for your users to authenticate with your application and Linear. We also added more fine-grained scopes to the API so that you can only get the access you need. Several companies have already built their integrations on OAuth2, including Jam, and our Zapier integration is using it as well.
To start developing a new Linear OAuth application, head to your API settings and create a new application. To view applications that you have authorized to access your account, go to your application settings.
Read more in the Linear OAuth2 documentation.
Two weeks ago we announced the new sub-issues editor as a Linear Preview. It features drag&drop reordering, faster composing and other improvements. Today we're rolling out the new experience to all Linear users. Open any issue, hit CmdShiftO and add new sub-issues one by one.
ProTip: When composing a sub-issue, save it with CmdEnter and add another one.
We craft Linear to give our users the best experience in the Mac OS environment, paying attention to details. This new app icon fits better with the new Big Sur icon design guidelines. We hope this icon will find a prominent place on your dock. You should get the automatic update later today or you can download the new version manually from here.
We want Linear to fit into your workflow and feel like it's your tool. We initially created dark and light themes so that you could customize the app to your preference and now we've added the ability for you to set any theme you wish.
Theming apps can be complicated and we wanted to make this feature accessible for everyone. We've designed it so that you only need to set a few colors, such as the background, text and accent colors, which we then use to generate complimentary shades for borders and elevated boxes. To customize the theme in Linear, you can simply take the colors of your favorite text editor or set it to match your company colors. You can also share Linear themes with others by copying and pasting a single-line list of colors. Add custom themes under preferences in account settings.
Here are some themes we use on the team. Join our Linear community Slack to share custom themes you create with others in the new #themes channel.
Sub-issues help track larger pieces of work and allow coordination between different people and components. To make it easier to add and manage sub-issues, we have rebuilt how they are shown on issue views. Now you can quickly add multiple sub-issues without ever leaving the page and just with your keyboard. Press CmdShifto to open the sub-issue editor, enter the issue details and hit CmdEnter to save it and continue adding another one. Sub-issues can also be reordered in the list by dragging and dropping them to your desired order.
This is a preview feature. Admins can turn on new sub-issue editing for your workspace by selecting Enable: New sub-issues from the command menu (Cmdk then search for "preview").
If your company uses an identity provider to login to services, we've added support for SAML authentication so that you can use it to login to Linear, too. It's available through our new Plus plan. We currently support most identity providers including Okta, Google, OneLogin, LastPass, Auth0 and Bitum. See a more detailed overview of the features provided in the Plus plan on the plans page.
We're giving you more control over your notification settings. You can now customize what types of notifications you will receive and how you will receive them.
Notification types can selectively be turned on or off for all notification methods, Slack personal notifications, email, and desktop push notifications. Under each method, you can specify the triggers for sending notifications.
For instance, you can choose to receive only Slack personal notifications whenever you're assigned an issue but to receive Slack, Desktop and email notifications when an assigned issue is marked urgent or blocking. You can choose to turn off email notifications for issue comments specifically but keep notifications for status changes and @ mentions. Customize your notifications in your notification settings.
Searching for issues by their title just got a lot easier and faster. When you're on a list or board page, hit CommandF to open a search field that filters down the content based on the search query in real-time as you type. When done, press Esc to close the search field and show all of your issues.
You can now manually order your favorites in the sidebar so that the views and issues you access most often are even easier to get to. Just drag and drop a favorite to any position in the list.
We have updated our Zapier integration to include Zap triggers for new and updated issues. When you're setting the triggers, you're also able to apply filters for various issue properties such as labels and projects. This should make it easy, for example, to filter all new issues with the label "bug" that have been opened in a team.
In addition to triggers, we also improved authentication and you'll be able to grant access with a single click instead of creating API keys.
In the last changelog, we introduced Views as a Linear Preview feature. Views makes it easy to create and save views that include exactly the issues you want to see. Now Views is available to everyone. Get started with Views by clicking on the Views item in your sidebar.
branchName
and priorityLabel
fields for Issue
resourceupdatedAt
pagination orderWe're adding support for custom issue views as a Linear preview feature. This makes it easy to create and save views that include exactly the issues you want to see. Your can favorite saved views so that they show up in the sidebar, giving you easy access to them. You can also share views with colleagues within your organization.
Examples of views that you could create:
We hope you'll find a lot more uses for custom views and we think this will make Linear work better for many different types of organizations.
Admins can turn on Views for your workspace by selecting Enable: Views from the command menu (Cmdk then search for "preview"). Views will show up under My Issues. Click on it to create your first view or save any existing list or board view as a custom view with AltV or by clicking the save view icon.
If you have time-sensitive issues, like renewing subscriptions, contracts or certificates, you can now add due dates to issues.
Issue lists and board views will display issue due dates. To help you find issues that require your attention, the due date icon will turn orange when the date is approaching and red when the issue is due on the same day or overdue.
You can add a due date to any issue by typing CmdD when viewing an issue or when an issue is selected on a board or list. This will bring up a date picker so you can choose the due date you wish. Alternatively, right-click to open a contextual menu or use Cmdk to search for the Set Due Date action.
You can apply due date related to filters to your list or board views, too. Type F and then select from the following: Due soon, Due today, No due date, Has due date or is Overdue.
Navigating between issues, selecting and moving them around are some of the most common interactions in Linear. We have recently made some significant improvements to how you select issues and added a few new features to lists and boards:
Hopefully, these changes should make everyday tasks in Linear feel easier and more intuitive.
We've had support for multiple workspaces for a few months but you were limited to viewing workspaces under a single Linear account. If you had multiple workspaces under different email accounts, that meant you had to log out and back to switch between workspaces or keep Linear open in different browsers.
This week we're rolling out multi-account support. Once you're logged into Linear, you can add another account and then seamlessly switch between them.
This makes it much easier to have a work and personal Linear account along with a myriad of other use cases.
To add an account or switch between them, click on your workspace name to use the new account switcher that replaced the workspace switcher in the upper left corner. You can also switch accounts through the command menu (CmdK) by simply typing the name of the workspace.