We didn't deploy to production last week, so we held off on publishing a changelog that would have features nobody could use. So this is a double-feature!

Code Review Experience

We changed up how selections and quoting works!

NOTE: This is likely the most noticeable change, so we're putting it first. We hope this is a net improvement for usability, but with any of these UX changes, there will be people whose lives are improved and worsened by this. Please let us know, whichever side of that you are, by commenting/reacting on the message selection issue! Now, to the actual change!

When you select code, we bring up a command palette with 2 commands: one to create a new discussion with the selected code quoted or to copy the selected code.

Previously, if you then clicked on that code it would create a discussion and quote the code, but now that only happens when the command palette is used. This makes the behavior consistent with the command palette options that show up when you select text in a comment:

That first button does the same thing, but quotes the markdown into the current discussion thread, so you can comment on a comment.

As a child of the 90's, I believe this is culturally appropriate. Though I'm afraid anyone born in the 00's now thinks I personally know Xzibit.

Another improvement in the quoting command in the comment palette is that we keep markdown styling (by reverse-engineering it from the rendered HTML to handle comments from GitHub) so lists, styling, etc are all kept.

Draft comments don't disappear anymore

It was possible for you to start a draft in a thread, then for someone else to reply/resolve that thread, and your draft would then get hidden. This would cause your draft to still count to your draft counter, but clicking on that counter would seemingly not scroll to any comment.

Handling large numbers of files better

A recurring theme for a month now is that we're working on improving our performance with incredibly large PR's with 500 to thousands of files. This time, we made the File Matrix collapse large groups, so any groups (such as reverted files) over 200 files are collapsed by default.

Other groups can be created by completion conditions, so if you have a monorepo or want to organize files in the file matrix some other way, groups can be created and any large ones will be automatically collapsed as well.

Patch/Diff files are rendered better

If you have a patch file (also known as the output of the diff program) in your codebase, then you may have noticed that we highlight trailing spaces in all files by default. While that's what everyone's usually happy with (and we do support custom CSS for language-specific overrides if you need them), an Enterprise customer reported that diff-syntax files actually should have trailing spaces in many normal situations, but not all situations, and therefore custom CSS was insufficient.

Now, if you have a patch file with trailing spaces, we only highlight (with a red dot) the ones that are unwanted:

Playing well with others

Some of you use a competitor's product in the same repository as you use ours. Maybe it's for a trial, or a mix of teams/users, but whatever the reason is, we get it. We still like you though, so please let us know if we're not playing well with someone else.

This time around, we fixed our auto-merge warning to not consider Pull Approve as a merge-blocking status check. That's because when we publish approvals, that may satisfy PullApprove's rules, sending a passing status check and triggering GitHub's auto-merge behavior. As a result, we still warn that sending an approval on a PR with auto-merge enabled may cause a merge to happen.

Contrast settings work again

That bar now affects all pages, and you don't have to open the settings to make them take affect. Whoops!

Subscriptions and organizations

New trial mechanism

Previously, trials and subscriptions were tied to individual users due to a few historical reasons. However, that consistently caused issues and confusion, so now we're fixing that. Starting now, trials are tied to GitHub organizations, so the button has moved but the effective behavior for most people is the same. It's just more intuitive, hopefully!

Bug fixes and performance improvements

Welcome back to our favorite section on miscellaneous changes!

• Continuing our transition away from Angular towards Vue to improve our performance and feature velocity.

• Fixed a few Javascript errors around selected text (reported to us but not visible to users).