Introducing Tags and Filtering in PR Focus!

PR Focus is pleased to introduce a roundup of new features requested by users: Tags, Filters, and new Accessibility Settings!

A team lead requested the ability to assign tags to pull requests in PR Focus, and then view PRs where those tags had been assigned. Their use case was:

  • I want to privately track pull requests based on some criteria I assign, without using GitHub labels. I want this info to be visible only to me.
  • I want a way to view all pull requests associated with that criteria.
  • I want to share info with stakeholders on a specific cadence - weekly, monthly, or quarterly.

This use case is very relatable, and once I got the request, it became obvious how widely applicable this could be!

  • Track a specific feature implementation across pull requests - even across repositories - with tags!
  • Track an important initiative through tags.
  • Track the work for a specific release through tags.
  • Track pull requests related to a specific customer through tags.

My team immediately has uses for this functionality, so it was one of the first things I wanted to add after the v1.0 launch.

With v1.1, you can:

  • Create, edit, and delete Tags
  • Apply tags to pull requests (and remove them)
  • View all tagged pull requests in a special Tagged PRs dashboard
  • Filter to see only the PRs related to a specific tag
  • Apply date filters to see PRs in a specific date range related to a specific tag

Screenshot showing the Tagged PRs Dashboard with the Filter by Tag drop-down menu expanded to show the available tags for filtering

To get started with Tags, check out the Tagged PRs documentation.

Automatically Watch, Ignore, or Apply Tags through user-defined filters

Another beta tester requested the ability to define filters to automatically ignore pull requests. The requester wanted to be able to automatically ignore Snyk dependency update PRs. But it’s easy to see a lot of uses for manual filters, such as:

  • The ability to automatically Watch or Ignore PRs from a specific user
  • The ability to automatically Watch or Ignore PRs based on keywords in the Title or Description - a specific naming pattern, for example, such as “Bug”
  • The ability to automatically Ignore all PRs where you’re not the PR author. PR Focus overrides Ignore when you become a Reviewer or Assignee, so there’s no chance you’ll miss an important PR. If you don’t care about the other work in a repository, this can save you time over manually Watching or Ignoring PRs.

When you combine it with the requsted tagging feature, it also seemed like a great opportunity to automatically apply tags based on some criteria.

With v1.1, you can:

  • Create, edit, and delete Filters.
  • Filters can Watch or Ignore PRs, or apply a Tag.
  • Incoming PRs automatically have Filters applied.

PR Focus does not retroactively apply filters.

Screenshot showing the “Edit a Filter” window with multiple filter criteria, an option to edit or remove each one, an option to add more filter criteria, and an option to rename the filter.

To get started with Filters, check out the Filter PRs documentation.

New Accessibility Settings

During launch week, a user requested settings to override the glyphs that display for pull request status and review status. This release provides new accessibility settings to override the glyphs and display their text representations in the relevant views.

Screenshot showing the accessibility settings tab with sections for controls and glyphs

To get started with the new accessibility settings, check out the Settings documentation.

What’s next?

The PR Focus website GitHub repository has templates for users to request features or file bug reports for the app. Feel free to leave a feature request for the PR Focus app on the website repository.

The next planned work includes some feature requests more focused on the developer’s individual contributor workflows, including a dashboard dedicated to contributor PRs - where you’re the PR author, a Reviewer, or an Assignee. But I’ve also got some of my own planned feature work that I think you’re going to like. Enough to keep improving PR Focus for the foreseeable future!

Help spread the word!

If you find PR Focus useful, please help spread the word! This app is currently one dev’s side project, and my reach is limited. I’d love to help more people find PR Focus, so if you have found it useful, I’d love it if you can:

  • Tell people you know about the app. Maybe they’ll find it useful, too!
  • Leave a rating or review on the App Store. This really helps!
  • Let me know what you’ve found most useful about PR Focus. I have my own reasons for using it, but some of my beta testers use it in wildly different ways. The better I understand what people find useful about it, the better I can communicate about it to other folks who might find it useful!
Last modified August 18, 2024: Add screenshots (a004585)