Changelog

Auto-closing and auto-archiving of issues⁠

We announced the preview of our issue auto-close feature a couple of weeks ago. Today we're announcing its sibling, auto-archive, and moving both features out of preview, so they're available for everyone.

An important part of the Linear method is the principle "Keep a manageable backlog". We think it's best to leverage sensible automation to help you stay more focused and efficient and to save you from having to manually comb through your backlog and tons of closed issues.

As you work hard and complete your cycles and issues, completed issues pile up. Our new auto-archive feature will scan your issues and automatically archive those that have been closed for several months. This process also ensures your client will keep running smoothly and fast.

Auto-close and auto-archive are now automatically enabled for all new teams. To try them out on your current team, navigate to Settings > Team > Workflow. There you'll be able to turn them on and configure the time and status to move the issues to.

Mark issues as duplicate⁠

We've added a new issue relation that lets you mark issues as a duplicate of another issue. You can mark an issue as duplicate using the command menu (md) or select "Mark as duplicate of" in the status drop-down of the issue details. When you mark an issue as a duplicate of another, Linear will automatically close the issue and add a relation between the two issues.

When your team grows, you usually start receiving several bug reports for the same root cause. Marking as duplicate lets you close duplicate reports, but still keep the relation to the closed issues handy in case they contain additional information that might come in handy when debugging the problem.

Improvements to View options⁠

We added several improvements to new view options. While the feature is still in Linear Preview, you can turn it on for your workspace by selecting Enable: New view options from the command menu (CmdK).

• Added options to order issue lists by created date and last updated
• Added view options to Inbox
• Option to hide/show empty groups in lists and board views
• Option to hide older completed issues
• Board views are now always manually sorted

Other fixes and improvements⁠

• New "Copy pre-filled create issue URL to clipboard" command lets you turn any issue into an URL for creating a new issue with all the appropriate sections filled out
• Improved the estimates display in board views
• Fixed an issue where URL parameters supplied to linear.new would not be parsed correctly
• Tooltips for estimates in group headers now also display the issue count
• Improved the styling of icon buttons across the app
• Improved animations for displaying popover menus

Linear Preview: View options⁠

In the coming weeks, we'll add better controls for many of Linear's views. Today we're introducing a new preview feature that lets you customize the layout, ordering, type and fields that are shown on issues. You can customize your view only or save your preference to make it the team's default view. Today the following options are available and we'll add more over time:

• Layout: Pick list or board layout in cycle, project or label views
• Ordering: We now support manual ordering for both boards and lists! Available in most team views
• Show sub-issues: Toggle on and off sub-issues in your view
• Display properties: Pick which issue fields you want to see in your view

You can turn on View options for your workspace by selecting Enable: New view options from the command menu (Cmdk).

Improved search results in the command menu⁠

Searching in the command menu (Cmdk) will now also search through second-level actions and display them in the search results.

For example, if you search for "add label" it will show you the top-level "Add label..." action, but also include all the different labels that would have been displayed had you subsequently selected the "Add label..." action (e.g. "Add label Bug"). This also works when you search for text contained in a second-level action. For example, searching for "bug" will find the "Add label Bug" action.

New issue URL parameters⁠

You can now construct new issue URLs that prefill any of the properties for the new issue. This lets you create links that assign the newly created issues to a specific person, add labels or even provide a template for a user to fill out. For example, the query parameters in this link will create a new issue with the title and description filled out and the label "bug" assigned.

The supported query params are as follows:

• title
• description
• status
• assignee
• estimate
• label
• labels (comma-separated)
• cycle
• project

Other improvements and fixes⁠

• Open team actions are now ordered according to the users' team membership
• Performance improvements to list rendering
• Various improvements and fixes to rendering for board and list views

Linear Preview: Auto-close stale issues⁠

It's common for backlogs to build up with issues that become irrelevant or will never get addressed. We're introducing issue auto-closing to automate the trouble of manually clearing stale issues. Once enabled, issues will be auto-closed and marked canceled if they haven't been updated after a certain time period.

You can turn on Auto-close for your workspace by selecting Enable: Issue auto-closing from the command menu (Cmdk). You'll configure the time period and applied status under Settings > Team > Workflow.

Other improvements and fixes⁠

• GitHub and GitLab now support including multiple issue IDs in the closing statement in pull request descriptions (e.g. Fixes ENG-123, DES-5 and ENG-256)
• The Slack integration now supports setting the issue assignee
• Integrations which change issue status now set the issue to be the top item on the board
• Improved application load time and significantly reduced memory usage
• Improved user search in filters
• Improved menu closing with mouse
• Improved focus styling on buttons and links
• Improved checkboxes and toggles to have more area for clicks
• Underscores are now converted into dashes in issue URLs
• Team filter is now included in My Issues and search pages if the workspace has multiple teams
• Emoji and user suggestions aren't included inside codeblocks anymore
• Issue suggestions are now limited to 5 when being referenced with # in the editor
• Stability fixes to realtime sync
• Fixes to project graphs and completion time
• Fixed cycle details panel on small displays
• Fixed duplication of workflow statuses on new team creation when using another team as a base
• Fixed application controls on Chromebooks

Filter improvements⁠

We've made some big improvements to the filter command menu. When you open the filter menu (f) and select any of the content types you want to filter with, we now compute how many issues in your current view would match each value. This gives you a good overview of the number of issues that would be selected were you to apply that filter.

The filter command menu will now also hide any unmatched filter values under a sub-section.

Previously we would list all possible values regardless of whether they match any issues in the current view. For example, if you were looking at a project and wanted to filter against assignees, we would previously list all the users in your organization. Now the filter menu is much more useful and will display only the users that have assigned issues in the project.

The Search view and My Issues potentially display issues from multiple teams. Filters have great improvements across these pages, too. We now group issue statuses and labels across teams, so that if you search for a label called "Bug", we display issues from all teams that match the same label name. And you are now able to filter against all labels and issue statuses from all teams, instead of having to choose from labels and issue statuses of the last active team.

Other improvements and fixes⁠

• Project graphs are now displayed for all projects instead of appearing after we've gathered 1 week worth of progress information
• Project graphs have now better styling for the prediction cone and target dates
• Pull request icons are now sized correctly on board views
• The Google Sheets integration can now be run manually from the integration page and from the command menu
• When adding a label to multiple issues at once, the command menu will list all labels that are missing from any of the selected issues
• Fixes to file encoding when uploading text documents

linear.new⁠

We're now proud owners of the linear.new domain which is an easy to remember way to create a new Linear issue. Just type it in any browser and we'll forward you to the new issue creation page as long as you're logged into your account.

New setting: Upcoming cycle count⁠

By default, Linear generates two upcoming cycles if you have the feature enabled. This lets your team plan ahead by adding issues to future ones. If you're using relatively short cycles, you might want to increase the number of upcoming cycles available. Head over to your team settings to change how many upcoming cycles Linear creates. You can add up to 10 upcoming cycles.

Workspace deletion⁠

Linear now has functionality to completely delete your workspace and all associated data. It's accessible to all workspace admins under the workspace settings page.

Other improvements and fixes⁠

• Linear's Google integration is now verified and will no longer throw a warning when integrating with Google Sheets
• Added team, priority and status information to issue webhook payloads
• Several fixes to loading the application offline
• Fixed issues which could lead to multiple integrations being enabled on the same account
• Fixed GitHub onboarding step on mobile devices
• Fixes to users receiving duplicate push notifications
• Improved application Javascript bundle sizes
• Improved communication around premium features in settings
• Tooltips are now positioned better
• Deleting a team now includes an additional confirmation for security

Project completion graphs⁠

Project pages received a requested feature – completion graphs. These graphs show you the progress you're making towards completing the project.

You'll be able to see how your project scope has changed over time. The project completion graphs will also predict how long it will take to complete the project. The prediction is based on the velocity at which issues in the project are completed, where more recent weeks weigh more heavily than older weeks.

You can access them from the project details pane, which you can open from the toolbar or by pressing Command/Ctrli on the project page.

Changelog updates in the app⁠

To make it easier to follow what has changed in Linear, we now show links to the latest changelog posts in the app sidebar. When there are new updates, the indicator will change color to Linear purple and you can quickly jump to the changelog post. You can also subscribe to changelog updates via email and Twitter.

Other improvements and fixes⁠

• Improves messaging around sync and offline mode. Tooltips now display more information about changes that have not been saved.
• Fixed a regression on closed cycle pages, where moved issues were not shown
• You can now correctly search for "no label" in the filter menu
• Disabled push notifications for reactions as it was too noisy
• The editor formatting toolbar no longer disappears when a selection ends outside of the editor bounds.
• Fixes to codeblock generation
• Fixes deletion of teams that are part of a multi-team project
• Fixed privacy policy and terms not showing up correctly
• Fixed problem with issues getting assigned the same identifier

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