Evolving GitHub Issues - Public Preview

[github-staff]

GitHub Issues is evolving! 🥳

Feedback wanted

Thank you for participating in the issues public preview for sub-issues, issue types and advanced search.

To provide your feedback on other experiences released at the same time, please visit:

• Sub-issues Public Preview #148714
• Issue Types Public Preview #148715
• Advanced Search for Issues Public Preview #148716

This new functionality is built on top of a UI rewrite of issues, which we would love your feedback on!

The aim of this rewrite was to clear up technical debt, allowing us to move faster in bringing new functionality to issues. With this in mind our goal has been parity with the existing experience. It should feel very familiar with only a few minor cosmetic tweaks.

The experiences that have been included so far in these updates are:

• The repository issues index
• The main issue body
• The issue creation experience

The milestones, labels and /issues dashboard pages have not yet been migrated.

Please leave your feedback below on what is working well, any bugs you encounter, and what else you'd like to see!

[mcanouil]

Parsing of code blocks in issue templates within the new GitHub Issues is broken. (see the bottom of the screenshots)

Additionally, as you can see at the top, the name of the template and its description is no longer displayed in the preview of the new issues.

Preview	Current

Using extra backticks or indentation leads to different parsing issue in the preview. (None allows to get proper display as without the new GitHub Issues)

Extra backticks block

Indentation block

name: Bug report description: Report an error or unexpected behavior labels: [bug] body: - type: markdown attributes: value: | You can share a Quarto document using the following syntax: `````markdown ````qmd --- title: "Reproducible Quarto Document" format: html engine: jupyter --- This is a reproducible Quarto document using `format: html`. It is written in Markdown and contains embedded Python code. When you run the code, it will produce a message. ```{python} print("Hello, world!") ``` {#fig-placeholder} {{< lipsum 1 >}} A reference to @fig-placeholder. The end. ```` ````` - type: textarea attributes: label: Bug description description: Description of the bug. placeholder: Please describe the bug here.

name: Bug report description: Report an error or unexpected behavior labels: [bug] body: - type: markdown attributes: value: | You can share a Quarto document using the following syntax: ````qmd --- title: "Reproducible Quarto Document" format: html engine: jupyter --- This is a reproducible Quarto document using `format: html`. It is written in Markdown and contains embedded Python code. When you run the code, it will produce a message. ```{python} print("Hello, world!") ``` {#fig-placeholder} {{< lipsum 1 >}} A reference to @fig-placeholder. The end. ```` - type: textarea attributes: label: Bug description description: Description of the bug. placeholder: Please describe the bug here.

Original issue template for the screenshots: https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-cli/blob/main/.github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE/bug_report.yml

[boazreicher]

Thank you for reporting this. We can reproduce the issue, and are currently looking into it.

[karlhorky]

Copying my comment from discussion 139935 (cc @alondahari @labudis):

---

Linking to a text fragment does not work with the new GitHub Issues UI, reproduction steps:

1. Use a browser that supports linking to text fragments (eg. Google Chrome)
2. Visit a page with the new GitHub Issues UI (eg. Preflight Docker container with PostgreSQL database: opts.uid is NaN upleveled/preflight#588)
3. Select some text on the page, right click and select "Copy Link to Highlight" (see screenshot below)
4. Visit the example link
5. 💥 Observe that the page either scrolls to the wrong position and does not highlight the text

Expected (old GitHub Issues UI)

Example link:

https://github.com/lovell/sharp/issues/4247#:~:text=provide%20sample%20image(s)

Correct scroll position, highlighted "provide sample image(s)" text:

Actual (new GitHub Issues UI)

Example link:

https://github.com/upleveled/preflight/issues/588#:~:text=We%20need%20to%20investigate

Incorrect scroll position, no highlighted text:

---

Also, copying the comment on my discussion thread by @MasterInQuestion:

The janky anchor navigation is far more pervasive...
    github.com/orgs/community/discussions/139935#discussioncomment-11058053

[labudis]

@karlhorky thanks for flagging this again! We are aware of this issue but we are working through a large backlog of ideas and suggestions and this particular fix has not yet reached the top of the priority list. We do consider every piece of feedback that comes from the community so please keep highlighting anything that could be improved - it truly helps!

[MichaReiser]

Copying my comment from the previous discussion

---

We're still using the legacy issue template workflow because we want only a single template with some pre-defined content in the description. We don't want users to have to select a template.

We noticed that the issue template no longer works after opting into the public beta. Now, I'm mainly curious to understand if this is intentional because the workflow is considered legacy or if you plan on bringing back support for legacy templates, and we can keep using it. Thank you

[labudis]

@MichaReiser thanks for your feedback! The legacy issue template workflow has been superseded by the new issue templates about 4-5 years ago. The support for the legacy issue templates has been removed with the New issues experience and currently there is no plan to bring that back.

However, I understand the value of not having to pick a template when creating an issue, and have logged your feedback as a feature request. For completeness, are there any other benefits of the legacy issue template that you're missing?

In the meantime, I'd recommend setting up your repository with the new issue template.

[MichaReiser]

Thanks. No, it's really just that the new issue template feels overkill for projects with exactly one template.

[janbrasna]

I'm not sure what is actually part of what "experience"/preview, as this discussions space doesn't really make it easy to navigate and understand how it all relates together, with announcements posted as "unanswered questions", and messaging from staff indistinguishable from any other content amidst emoji explosions in categories and labels looking like unicorn barf of color and shapes and other myspace-esque qualities that probably only make sense to folks under the legal drinking age… so sorry if I'm not posting in the right thread, but they all look quite alike, with some of the boilerplate text of announcements recycled, esp. wrt what's in scope and what not, that seems to be identical across the threads, so you've effectively lost me there;)

1. I've noticed there's some "preview" without any info, feedback link, or opt-out (incl. in settings):

• Issues showing "Preview" badge with no additional context taking up valuable space #149146

2. Not sure if the new editor UI is also part of this, can't find the same as above (missing preview info, opting out of the experience, and a link to feedback) to post under the announcement/feedback there, so made a new thread:

• Issue composing textarea feedback #149149

[labudis]

@janbrasna Thank you for sharing your feedback and I'm sorry to hear you did not find our communications clear. It's one of the largest public previews in recent GitHub history touching many parts of the Issues experience and whilst we strive our best to communicate clearly, there is always scope to do better and we take your comments on board.

Regarding the scope of the release, it impacts virtually every part of the Issues experience. We focused on improving the performance and usability of the new issues experience whilst keeping it as similar as possible to the classic Issues experience that our users know and love. In addition, we have added three completely new features: sub-issues, issue types and advanced search.

I will respond to the two specific pieces of feedback in their respective discussion threads.

[janbrasna]

Oh no worries Tadas, I'm just probably not wired to navigating the discussions space for feedback purposes;) and failed to find the appropriate threads instead of submitting new ones. Hopefully it's relevant to what you've been working on — thanks for taking a look, appreciate what you do here!

we have added three completely new features

Great job with those major features, hat tip!

[dirkf]

The design whereby issues are listed in a single page is fundamentally useless for an issue with more than a few tens of posts. It should be possible to show an issue with a large number of posts in a multi-page scheme where it isn't necessary to expand elided posts.

[janbrasna]

Some time ago, there was this feature to "expand all" hidden posts along the timeline on especially long issues/PRs — useful esp. if you need to search for something in "872 items hidden" and want it expanded all at once. Can't seems to have that feature anymore, as I now have to spend 20mins clicking "show more" by approx 60 items in one go, to have the full timeline to be able to search for the content I need to reference or respond to…

For some of the very noisy / very public issues that get referenced from all over, I'd welcome a change that would prioritize actual posts, and not care about "pings" from other projects' issues or PRs — these are the "657 items hidden" that I need to expand to find the dozen actual comments from humans among all the timeline — and it gets extremely difficult to try to find a human posting in all the hidden items, uncovering it bunch by bunch.

[ichard26]

I would strongly recommend the Refined GitHub extension which can remove all non-comment events from the issue timeline. Of course, GitHub should natively support this, but RGH is a great interim solution.

Unfortunately, this RGH feature is still broken with the new issue UI.

[ohiosveryown]

Some time ago, there was this feature to "expand all" hidden posts along the timeline on especially long issues/PRs

This is something that exists in issues, but PR's does still have the pagination / progressive load more interaction (unless I'm misunderstanding).

I definitely hear the comments that it would be a more pleasant experience to be able to filter out some of the noise, and overall to just be able to navigate a longer issue more easily. I'll relay the feedback.

[ichard26]

I know it's better form to leave a reaction (ironic, yes), but this is important to me:

I definitely hear the comments that it would be a more pleasant experience to be able to filter out some of the noise, and overall to just be able to navigate a longer issue more easily. I'll relay the feedback.

Thank you! ❤️

[janbrasna]

@ohiosveryown Thanks Matthew, appreciate it. For demonstration purposes consider e.g. this issue/announcement as an example: actions/runner-images#10636 — it's linked to from gazillion of projects, and trying to find a comment from maintainer/staff somewhere in the middle of the timeline is a pain:

[ichard26]

First all, I want to say congratulations on the new features! I haven't had the time to play around with them as the preview has just rolled out for my repositories, but they do seem useful on a first glance. Sub-issues and issue categories are of course totally doable with crosslinking and labels, but giving them dedicated space in the UI is nicer. I'll follow up if I have further feedback once I've played around the new features.

Anyway, I'm sure I missed the relevant discussions on the old (and unwieldy) thread, but I want to bring up two issues (🥁) I have:

The sticky issue header no longer states the creation date or the number of comments

New:

Before:

While I appreciate that some people probably don't need this information, I find it invaluable having these two pieces of information always available to me. When I'm sorting through tens of issues at once, it can be easy to lose track of what exact issue I'm on. For example, if I'm looking at an older and more heavily commented issue, I'll probably prioritize fixing this issue over a newer issue with less activity. Of course, I can still find this information from other places, but I have to click or scroll away, when with the old UI, it was just right there!

Is it possible to readd this information to the header? If not (maybe it's used by the new features?), could we at least add a count of comments somewhere on the issue view?

Labels are overly aggressively truncated in the timeline

This seems to be a trend with all of the recent UI refreshes. I get that making an UI less busy is nice and all, but there is more than enough room to display the full type: feature request label without being truncated.

Shown issue: pypa/pip#13165

[ohiosveryown]

The sticky issue header no longer states the creation date or the number of comments

This is something we talked about quite a bit internally, the amount of information to surface in the sticky header. I could see how comments would be helpful when having multiple issues open. I'll file this and the label truncation to the team.

[janbrasna]

One piece of a11y feedback I'd love to see sorted somehow rather soon(ish), as I'm not currently aware of a way to opt-out of the UI (as that's managed on repo owner side, or org/enterprise side?) is this aggressive flickering loading the numbers and search highlights:

Screen.Recording.2025-01-14.at.22.38.10.mov

(Safari 18, macOS 15)

For my health condition this is only extremely uncomfortable, but for some others this flicker can be actually even dangerous.

Could this please only display once loaded fully, and not "fly in" from random directions? (I'd honestly prefer the static values as the classic experience or PR view has upon loading in the first place.)

[ohiosveryown]

Accessibility Is definitely an area we value heavily, so I really appreciate your feedback here. I'll file this and relay it to the team.

[janbrasna]

Thanks! I inspected the recording frame by frame and noticed: the numbers fly in from above, or move up and down; their labels move up and down; also the pills changing size and position, and the labels moving from their default positions to accommodate for longer number values after they are loaded; also while numbers invisible the filter dropdown labels next to it move left and right. That's a lot of movement!