Changelog

New setting for team priority ordering⁠

Linear offers multiple ways to order issues in lists through view options, from manual to automatic. Historically we have defaulted to priority ordering and pushed issues without priorities to the top of the list to encourage you to set the prioirity. This week we added a new team level setting which lets you decide if the issues without a set priority are shown first or last. To change the setting, find the Priorities section under your team's General settings

Fixes and improvements⁠

• Use the new "Add attachment from URL..." action to add any external links to your issues as attachments
• Slack integrations are removed when users get suspended or leave a workspace
• Fix submit button behavior in contact support modal
• You can now drag and drop all projects in the timeline
• Fixed an issue where the R shortcut in a cycle view would rename the cycle instead of the selected issue
• API: You can now specify an icon url (jpg or png) when creating or updating an issue attachment
• API: You can now link any url to an issue as an attachment using the `attachmentLinkURL` mutation

Issue view layout⁠

There's one aspect of the layout of the application that we haven't been too fond of since the beginning: The way the issue page renders on larger screens. We didn't want to make the issue content column too broad to keep the issue content readable, so we extended the issue details pane to the side of the screen. But this never looked quite right on on larger window sizes. We've been putting off fixing this as we have bigger changes planned for the issue page, but this week we finally decided to fix it and not wait for a bigger redesign.

We're now centering the issue content when your window size grows beyond a certain size. The issue details panel will also grow proportionally with your screen size, giving you more room for all the labels your issue might have.

Fixes and improvements⁠

• Updated design of the project bars in timeline
• It is now possible to resize the width of the left aside on the timeline page
• Fixed a bug causing the upgrade notification not to be clickable if it was triggered by the fast issue creation modal
• Zendesk integration now supports linking tickets from Zendesk installations with a custom domain
• Imported issues will now have their completed or canceled dates properly set if that can be determined, or set as the time of import if not
• API: Fixed a bug that was causing attachmentCreate to fail when passing the short format issue id rather than a UUID
• Improved contextual menu rendering performance
• Fixed side-scrolling issues with contextual menus
• Fixed some smaller corner roundness issues on the comment menu
• Workspace member settings have an upgraded design
• Fixed the workspace member settings not to show actions that the user can't undertake if they are not an admin.
• The keyboard shortcut for setting an issue due date has been changed from Cmdd to Shiftd
• The cycles page now contains better instructions on how to find the estimates settings, should it not be enabled
• Fixing an overflow problem when editing milestones
• Fixed problems editing the name of a project
• Deleting a team will now force you to type out the name of the team to make sure that users are deleting the intended team
• Alert dialogs with an input prompt now display input errors animated
• Fixed regression with command menu checkboxes

Linear Preview: Roadmap Timeline⁠

Today we’re launching a timeline visualization of your project roadmap in Linear. You can now plan, manage and track what needs to get done this month, quarter, and year, visually. With the roadmap timeline, see a high-level view of not just the projects in your organization but also the progress teams are making toward them and estimates for when projects will complete. It's a smart timeline synced to actual issue data that helps you avoid flying blind.

Planning with timeline⁠

Viewing projects in the context of time gives you a better understanding of what’s going on and when projects will complete. It’s also easier to plan for dependencies, such as when someone will free up to work on a new project, and spot projects that are falling behind or where teams may need more time or to adjust the scope.

Draggable project bars let you quickly make changes to your roadmap. Move the project to adjust the start date, extend or shorten the project length, and move the project up or down on the roadmap to reprioritize the work compared to other projects. Any updates made on the timeline will sync across the workspace. Especially early on in the planning phases, you'll have a lot of back-and-forth discussions on projects. The timeline view makes it easier to collaborate live since everyone can see the same view, understand the visual design intuitively, and any changes update near instantaneously on everyone else's screen.

Live predictions⁠

While a project is active, we'll generate an estimated completion date and show the projected date range on the timeline. These are the same estimates you see on project graphs and we calculate them using remaining issues and historical project velocity. A purple estimate shows up if the project has no set target date to give you a hint of when the project might complete, and a red estimate means the project is or is projected to take longer than the defined target date. The predictions take some time to generate after the project begins since they require recent project data, so you may need to wait a few days before it shows up. This live forecast gives you realistic and up-to-date information that you can use when making decisions on scope and planning.

✨ ProTip: To see a specific project's graph without leaving the roadmap, press the Space to launch peek while hovering over the project on the list or timeline.

Roadmap Timeline is available as a Linear Preview feature while we polish the last details. To enable it for your organization, press ⌘K and search for Timeline.

Fixes and improvements⁠

• Fixed a bug in template selection menus in team settings
• Fixed git branch names for issues containing ⌘
• Fix a bug when dragging list items in Firefox
• Fixed a bug so that you can now switch to another workspace after scheduling your current workspace for deletion and logging in again
• Improved discovery for editor related keyboard shortcuts
• Improved the assignee selector in board issue cards
• Parent issue is now maintained when creating multiple issues
• Images will no longer be duplicated when dragged from one position to another within the editor in Safari
• Images can now be dragged and reordered within the editor
• Added the option to order lists by issue due date
• Added more options for auto-archiving for teams using the Linear free plan
• Fixed a bug that prevented file uploads on iOS
• Long workspace names are now properly truncated in the sidebar workspace menu
• Fixed a layout glitch when first rendering the search results.

Improving performance at scale⁠

Over the past two months we received reports of slow performance affecting some of the larger Linear workspaces. We looked into the issues, and even made some changes to speed up the app, but determined that fixing the problem would require deeper work. Over the last couple of weeks, we have been heads down implementing fixes and planning larger changes to Linear's architecture to support the long term scalability of the service.

Unfortunately what makes Linear extremely fast for most users can also make it slow for others if we scale faster than expected, which we did. This stems from technical architecture choices we made to build Linear and their trade-offs. This didn't come as a surprise to us and we anticipated having to make changes sometime in the future, but not so soon and especially not after customers hit performance issues. We do our best to work on these issues before they can become a problem for an end-user.

This week we shared a pre-mortem that explains Linear's architecture, the performance issues these customers were hitting, and the steps we're taking in the near and short term to address them. While your workspace might not be affected, we wanted to share the document with all of you as we work through these challenges. If you hit performance issues, now or in the future, we'd like you to reach out so that we can fix them. The good news is that thanks to this work, Linear has gotten significantly faster for all users in the past two weeks. We consider speed a core feature of the product and will continue to treat it as a top priority as we scale.

Linear performance pre-mortem ->

Fixes and improvements⁠

• [API] attachmentsForURL query now returns a paginated list of results instead of an array
• [API] attachmentIssue query has been deprecated. Please use attachmentsForURL with issue sub-query instead.
• Zendesk integration now supports linking multiple issues into a customer ticket
• There's a new "Open issue" action, also accessible through the global OI key shortcut, that lists all the recently accessed issues and enables a quick search through issue titles, similar to how it used to work in the global command menu.
• Notifications for actions that have been changed or undone will no longer show up in your Inbox
• Fixed a bug where codeblocks would cause a CSS bug in issue description & comments
• The "Open projects" list now includes projects from all teams you're part of
• Removed duplicate fullscreen options from the desktop app menu
• Several style fixes for search input fields
• You can now filter issue states in the dropdown in issue create
• You can now unsubscribe from notifications for multiple issues
• Fixed a long-standing bug where lists would render incorrectly
• When creating a new team, we will now use your timezone rather than defaulting to UTC-7, Pacific Time
• Fixed a crash that could occur on the search page when searching a mis-formatted string
• Reduced minimum characters for searching to 2
• Added highlighting to issue identifier matches on the search page
• When using the keyboard shortcut / to focus the search input, the text is selected if the input is not empty for quicker searching
• History and navigation on the search page is improved. The back button and/or clicking the sidebar search button works correctly.
• Searching just for a number "123" will find issues that have 123 in their identifiers
• Fixed potential app crash with strings containing multiple or trailing spaces
• Added ability to clear recent items such as recent search queries or recently viewed issues. You can search for it in the command menu, by typing "clear recent".
• Links to shared custom views are now unfurled when shared to Slack
• Improved issue contextual menus by alphabetically ordering projects, limiting assignee list to issue's team members and improving styling
• Text formatted as inline code can now also have strikethrough formatting

New issue search⁠

Today we're rolling out the new search experience which features a more accurate search that searches over issue titles and descriptions as well as expanded functionality.

This new search experience replaces, improves, and consolidates all of our previous search options. It's your new go-to place to quickly find an issue with keywords or by typing its ID, for example, lin123 or LIN-123. Search terms are highlighted in the list of results to make relevant issues easier to find. Search now also surfaces archived and recently deleted issues. Your recent searches will show up on the search start page, too.

Search is designed to be quickly accessed using the / keyboard shortcut. You can use the new button in the main sidebar which replaces the previous search input box. You can also type search in the command line to launch it.

Another addition is that we show recently viewed issues on the search start page, which are a convenient shortcut to open an issue. This new feature also comes with a new key binding OI. Try it out!

Fixes and improvements⁠

• API: Issue attachments with the same URL can now be linked to multiple issues. Querying for attachments by using the URL as the id is being deprecated, but will return the first attachment with a matching URL for a transition period.
• Several performance improvement to loading the application for the first time
• Linear will now open the last used workspace when logging in to an account with multiple workspaces
• Reduced animations preference is now inferred from the OS settings and removed as a user preference
• Fixed "Open cycles" goto-shortcut in Inbox and other non-team views
• Improved reliability of copying issue IDs, URLs and git branches to clipboard
• Fixed copying an image to clipboard (currently not available in Firefox)
• Fixed file upload notification in the new issue composer
• Fixed issues where personal Slack notifications were disconnected unexpectedly
• Contextual menus are now closed from all mouse clicks
• Fixed a bug with the Github Migration Assistant form that was preventing moving to the next step after selecting a repository
• Improved settings to make it more clear how to change or cancel a plan in the Billing view
• Fixed issue which prevented logging into Figma from within the Figma embed in Linear desktop application

Fixes and improvements⁠

This week we've been focusing on larger upcoming functionality, so we only have minor fixes and improvements.

• Descript shared URLs are now embedded automatically in issue descriptions and comments.
• Issue editing actions in the fast issue editor now use the same keyboard shortcuts than in the rest of the application. To use the keyboard shortcuts, the title or description fields can't be focused.
• Issue editing actions in the issue view will now open pop-overs attached to the appropriate properties in the side pane.
• Opening issue peek using a quick press on has been fixed to work more reliably
• When pressing "Add label" in the issue view will now bring up a popover that lets you toggle any label on and off.
• When you have a sub-action editor open in the issue view, any issue editing actions triggered via the action menu or keyboard will target that sub-action unless you're hovering over another sub-action
• Issue peek will now disappear when the fast issue editor is opened
• Fixes a regression that could cause startup to be slow, especially on Safari and Firefox
• You can now delete an import up to 7 days after it was created.
• Fixed several bugs with the GitHub importer
• Fixed a bug with our Clubhouse importer
• Inserting a reference to an issue inside a description or a comment won't remove the rest of the sentence after it anymore
• It is now easier to select the workspace where you want an OAuth application to be installed
• Labels with the "%" character, like "50%", will now open correct URLs with proper encoding
• When filtering issues, "By creator" filter will now group all suspended users as a single entry
• Fixed some entries showing twice in the context menu
• The background of modal dialogs are once again tinted darker on macOS

Zendesk integration⁠

Working with your customers is key to high-performing product teams. As companies scale, much of the customer requests are piped into customer success tools such as Zendesk. This is why we're excited to add Zendesk to Linear's growing set of integrations.

Your customer success teams can now quickly file bug reports into Linear from within Zendesk and link feature requests to existing issues. We also added automation which re-opens and updates Zendesk tickets after the issue has been resolved (or canceled), so your customer success team can get back to the customer to update them on the progress. The integration makes it easier for your product team to prioritize their work based on customer needs and build a tighter feedback loop with your customers.

To enable the Zendesk integration, install our app from Zendesk Marketplace and enable the integration in your Linear settings.

Other fixes and improvements⁠

• When creating a new team with a team identifier that was previously used by some other team, you can now choose to delete the identifier
• Issues migrated into Linear via the Migration Assistant will now be labeled with "Migrated" rather than "Imported"
• Images included in the issue description markdown will be properly uploaded to Linear even if they are not a top-level document element (e.g., inside of block quotes)
• We now only hint at changing ordering in views that can be manually ordered
• Added a section highlighting the Migration Assistant in the workspace settings overview page
• Attachments are now shown before PR's in the issue view
• The command menu no longer lets you search for issues but you can open specific ones if you type the issue ID
• Improved communication around in-page find functionality
• Fixed a bug where the "Find in page" input field would be incorrectly aligned
• Creating an issue from a message in Slack will now add an issue attachment which links to the original message
• Draft pull requests that are closed will now show as closed on linked issues
• The status control in the "New issue" modal has been moved to make it easier to find.
• Filters that don't match any issues can now also be multi-selected
• Adds create new action from template to keyboard shortcut help
• Due dates in fast issue creator now correctly account for the user's timezone
• Fixed a bug that was preventing OAuth applications from being created
• Jira issues are now imported in the order of creation
• Fixed a bug where the issue status from default templates would not be applied on new issues
• We now display a nicer error message when trying to remove a user from their last team
• Improvements to the rendering of the workspace toggle when the syncing or offline badge is visible
• Images included in comment body markdown will be properly uploaded to Linear even if they are not a top-level document element (e.g., inside of block quotes)
• We will now import comments on issues you are migrating over from GitHub

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April 22nd outage⁠

On this Thursday, April 22nd we experienced a prolonged outage. The outage started at 7:25am UTC and lasted for roughly 3 hours during which time Linear was unavailable completely, or in offline mode which caused change syncing to be delayed.

The outage started due to an automatic vacuum process in one of the key tables in our Postgres database. We were getting close to running out of transaction IDs and Postgres forced an autovacuum on us even though the functionality was disabled for the table. Because we are running a managed Postgres instance on GCP, we weren't able to stop the autovacuum process and were forced to wait for it to complete. Once that issue was resolved, we encountered additional issues when trying to bring services online, due to the large number of clients trying to connect at the same time.

We are still investigating the exact details around this and plan to write a longer and more detailed post mortem once our investigation is ready. If you're interested in learning more, follow our Twitter for updates.

UPDATE: Post-mortem is now available

Smaller product improvements⁠

We love launching big new features, but we also love making smaller quality-of-life improvements. This week we focused on smaller improvements across the application. Here are a few highlights.

Private OAuth applications⁠

You can now restrict your OAuth applications to your own workspace by making them private. This is helpful if you have internal applications which rely on Linear as the data source and you need to support authentication for different users. Many services, like Retool, also support OAuth as an API authentication method out of the box as our implementation follows the standard patterns.

Open issue with ID in Linear command menu⁠

We have changed Linear's command menu (Cmdk) to now support opening a specific issue if you write, or paste, its ID to the menu. It even works with our git branch names so you can copy branch names from your terminal and quickly open the issue in Linear. This new implementation replaces issue search inside the command menu which we decided to remove as it was clunky to use and regular search (/) works better for that use case.

Sub-issue status in issue list⁠

Inspired by a user suggestion on Twitter we replaced a sub-issues icon with the status of sub-issue completion in the sub-issues list. This should make it easier to scan and visualize progress. Thanks @maximmart!

Other fixes and improvements⁠

• Better performance when updating action on a large number of issues
• We added a view option to hide completed issues from previous cycles
• Fixed a few timezone options that didn't work (sorry about that, Indianapolis)
• Board columns now scroll items into view when navigating with keyboard
• Fixed roadmap editing using IME inputs
• Fixed an issue where the new issue modal would open with old data
• Fixed the display of the next billing date in billing settings
• Improved the issue modal when used with on-screen keyboards
• Fixed bug where GitHub automation didn't wait for all the open PRs to be merged until closing the issue
• Fixed a bug that could cause Asana imports to result in an error
• Fixed error when non-admins create a new team and copy properties from an existing team
• Fixed the display of cycles in Inbox
• The Linear bot will now post a comment with a linkback to the URL of the issue linked with a GitHub pull request even if you add the URL in the description
• Fixed a bug that made it impossible to undo deleting an issue
• Added more icons to choose from for Views and Projects
• Added the team name to the title in the Recently Deleted page
• Added a hint on how to enable manual sorting if you try dragging items in non-sortable lists
• Fixed a bug where the status of default templates would not be applied for new issues

Auto-archive cycles and projects⁠

Last year we announced auto-closing and auto-archiving of issues. Now we are extending the auto-archive feature to projects and cycles.

One of the core principles behind the Linear Method is to "keep a manageable backlog." This applies to issues as well as cycles and projects, and adding sensible automation to help you achieve this lets you focus on the things that really matter.

If a project or cycle has been completed more than X months ago (this time period is configurable) and all the issues inside it have been archived, the project or cycle will also be archived. The feature is automatically enabled for all teams that have auto-archiving for issues set up. If you want to enable it for your team or change auto-archiving settings, navigate to Settings > Team > Workflow.

Deleting issues⁠

We made it possible to delete issues. Sometimes issues are created by mistake, and it makes no sense to keep them in the system. You can now delete them by pressing ⌘⌫ (or ⌦ for Windows and Linux users). Deleted issues will be available in the "Recently deleted" view which you can find through the command menu. Issues are permanently deleted after 14 days.

As part of this change, we removed the option to manually archive issues. We found that most users used the archive as a trash can for issues that they wanted to delete. At the same time, auto-archiving puts older completed issues inside the archive, which meant the archive served two disparate purposes.

We wanted to make the concepts around archiving and deleting issues more straightforward. We think that the archive is something that Linear should manage for you while deleting issues is your own choice.

Fixes and improvements⁠

• Fixed manual ordering in the cycles view
• Fixed a crash when creating an issue in a multi-team view
• Prevented unnecessary scroll bars from images on the Linear Method pages
• We now show an error message when dragging a non-draggable list item
• Fixed a crash when searching in and navigating to an empty list
• An unnecessary scroll bar no longer shows up on estimate settings
• The "No estimate" issue filter can now be activated in the command menu
• The "Reference another issue" action no longer shows in the command menu for unsaved issues
• The default issue template will no longer override drafted issue descriptions when you open the full page issue editor
• Reduced the time it takes to load Linear from scratch by about 25%
• Fix to prevent keyboard focus on hidden elements when in issue view
• Admins can now change a suspended user's username
• The keyboard shortcut to attach files ⌘⇧A when creating an issue or comment can now be triggered in more situations
• We no longer register the new window shortcut CtrlN as a global shortcut in the Windows app
• Fixed the alignment of the status icon when creating a sub-issue
• Added more icons to pick from for Projects and Views
• Updated icons in the contextual menu for projects

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Private teams⁠

As your company grows, you'll likely need to restrict access to a portion of your issues. For example, one team might be working on something that is supposed to be a surprise to the rest of the company, or the team might be forced to sign NDAs with an integration partner and keep details of their work hidden even from the rest of the company.

Whatever your reason to hide some issues from the rest of the workspace, you can now create private teams and have more fine-grained control over who can join the team.

When you create a private team or make an existing team private, you become the owner of the team. Only the team owner and workspace admins can invite users to private teams, and only active team members can see issues in a private team. To control access, we have a new members section under team settings.

Migration Assistant⁠

A couple of months ago, we launched importers in preview, allowing you to quickly import your issues, labels, projects, epics, and more from Jira, GitHub, Asana, and Clubhouse directly into your Linear workspace. Since then, we have continued to improve the importing experience. You can now customize how you would like to import issues and team members, as well as see a preview of what data will be imported with the new migration assistant.

If you are an admin, visit your workspace's import settings to get started.

Fixes and improvements⁠

• Updated supported browsers. We now target modern browsers to improve Javascript loading performance
• Fixed keyboard shortcut conflict (Ctrln) with new Windows application
• Fixed image loading issues as part of new user onboarding
• Fixes race condition when creating a new team and choosing to copy properties from a team that is subsequently deleted
• Fixed a case where attaching/detaching a parent issue would cause the issue to not be saved
• Fixed layout issues in the emoji picker
• Fixed a rare situation where a custom view preference could crash the client
• Moving issue between teams now correctly resets its status
• Improved styling of radio buttons for dark themes
• Improvements to list rendering performance
• We now clear multi-selection when pressing Tab in a list
• Improved list of notification settings to clarify different options
• Pull requests and external issue attachments are now shown as part of archived issues
• Fixes to issue estimates in custom views
• Jira importer now correctly imports the Jira issue type as a label
• Jira importer now imports correct issue backlinks for imported issues