Capture and edit issues

An issue starts as a title. Everything else can arrive later, and most of it edits in place. No mandatory fields, no ceremony, no seventeen-field form.

Before you start

A workspace. See Get started.
Nothing else. Members, Admins and the Owner can all create and edit issues. Who can do what.

Steps

Capture

Press Quick capture in the top bar, or c from anywhere outside a text field.
Name the problem. Titles hold up to 300 characters; the good ones use about forty.
Optionally add a description and set the chips under it: Status, Priority, Size, Assignee, Labels, Project (with its milestone) and, if you use cycles, a cycle. Picking a Ready stage also makes you tick Refined and ready to start. Here’s why.

Once the title has a few words, Quick capture may add labels to its Unsolicited opinion under the chips, such as Label UX, guessed from how your workspace already uses each label. Press one to add it or × to dismiss it. Nothing is added until you press one, and the Privacy page says what’s sent to work it out.

If the draft looks like something already filed, the same spot can point at up to three existing issues, such as Already filed? #412, with their status. Press one to open that issue in a new tab; your draft stays put. Press × to dismiss it. Hydrant never links, closes or merges anything for you. An Owner or Admin can turn these off in Settings › Issues › Suggestions; that stops connected agents’ duplicate checks too. Opinions slide in and out rather than jumping the form around.
Press Create issue, or ⌘Enter (Ctrl+Enter on Windows and Linux).

Hydrant opens the new issue. Tick Create another first when you’re emptying your head: the form stays open for the next one. Your half-written draft is kept in the tab if you close the form.

Other ways in:

In a grouped list, the + on a group header creates an issue already set to that group’s status, priority, assignee or size.
Sub-issue on an open issue, or Create sub-issue… in a row’s menu, creates a child of it.

Edit

Title: click it, type, press Enter.
Description: click it (an empty one reads “Describe the damage…”) and write. Your draft is kept in the tab and saves when you click away, or press Save changes.
Everything else: the properties beside the description, or right-click any row in a list (or press Shift+F10) for its menu. In a narrow panel the properties sit in a strip under the title, with ⋯ for labels, cycle, target, snooze and any properties that don’t fit on the line; Relationships, Evidence, Grants and Details follow the description.
Took it back: a property change’s confirmation carries Undo while it shows. Undo puts back the values that change replaced: status, priority, assignee, size, refinement, labels, cycle, target or project. A snooze that Done or Canceled cleared stays cleared. It’s an ordinary edit, so it leaves its own line in the history.
Next and previous: the arrows at the top of an open issue walk through the list you came from. Expand issue gives it the whole screen, and the link button copies its address.

Change several issues at once

In the issue list, tick the box at the start of each row you want. Hover a row to see its box, press x on the focused row, or choose Select from the row’s ⋯ menu. On a phone, the boxes appear once you select the first issue from that menu. Shift-click a box or a row, or press Shift+x, to select every row between it and the last one you picked. ⌘A selects every loaded row, leaving out collapsed groups.
A bar floats at the bottom of the list with how many issues you picked. Choose a status, priority, size, assignee, label to add or remove, project, cycle or refinement from it, or Move to trash…. Snooze until… snoozes them all to one date, time and timezone, and Unsnooze wakes the snoozed ones. Set target… gives them all one delivery target, with an optional reason, or clears it. Relations links every picked issue to one other issue: Set parent…, Blocked by…, Blocks… or Related to…. Search for that issue by title or #number and pick it. If you approve an environment, Approval approves, OKs behind a flag, holds, takes back or rejects every picked issue waiting in it. When the selection holds trashed issues, as in the Trash view, the bar offers Restore instead. Or right-click any selected row (or press Shift+F10, or use its ⋯) for the same changes as a menu, plus Copy issue IDs, Copy issue links, Copy orchestrate prompt (one prompt for the whole set) and Clear selection. On a row you didn’t select, the menu acts on that issue alone. In a grouped list, drag any selected row onto another group to move them all there.
A message confirms what saved and what was already set. If Hydrant couldn’t change an issue, the bar lists it with the reason until you dismiss it.

You can select up to 100 issues. If more issues match than are loaded, Select all … matching loads the rest first. If more than 100 match, narrow the filters. Esc or the bar’s × empties the selection, and so does changing the view, the filters or the grouping.

Each issue saves on its own, under the same rules as editing it alone. An unrefined issue moving to Ready asks you to confirm once for all of them. If someone changed an issue while you worked, that issue is skipped and named in the summary. If the connection drops partway, Retry this same batch checks and finishes the same changes without doubling any. Done and Canceled issues can’t be snoozed, so the summary names them and the rest still snooze. Links save one issue after another. If the issue you link to is itself picked, it’s skipped, and a link that already exists counts as already set. Hydrant still refuses a link that would go in a circle and names that issue. Set parent… leaves an issue that already has a different parent alone and names it, because changing a parent is reviewed one issue at a time. Closed projects and milestones only take issues one at a time.

A Canceled stage, Move to trash… or a drag of selected rows onto a Canceled group first checks what every selected issue is blocking and shows it in one review: how many issues lose a blocker, and under each selected issue, what its dependents are left with. Dependents you also selected are marked. Keep issues unchanged closes the review without changing anything. After you confirm, each issue saves against what you reviewed. When several selected issues block the same issue, the review shows what that issue is left with once all of them change. If an issue changed in the meantime, it’s left as it was and named as changed since review. The one exception is a change the batch itself caused, such as another selected blocker of the same issue saving first. Hydrant checks that nothing else the review showed has moved, and saves it anyway.

Write

The editor speaks Markdown and has a toolbar for people who’d rather not.

⌘B, ⌘I, ⌘U, ⌘E and ⌘K do bold, italic, underline, inline code and links.
Behind Aa sit headings, bullet, numbered and checklist lists, quotes and code blocks. The issue description and Playbook guides also get dividers, tables, collapsible sections, dates and diagrams, and table tools show up while you’re in a table. Quick capture and comments skip those, but Markdown you type or paste still works.
Type @ to link an issue, a person or an agent. Mentioning a person notifies them. Type # and a number, such as #12, to link an issue by number.
Type : and a name for emoji.
Markdown flips to the raw source, and Copy Markdown does what it says.
In Quick capture, the toolbar sits at the bottom left of the form, and Markdown and Copy Markdown wait behind Aa.

The full list of editor keys is in Keyboard shortcuts.

Attach images

Paste, drop anywhere on the editor, or use the image button in its toolbar. PNG, JPEG or WebP, up to 10 MiB each, up to 20 per description or comment. An image uploads right where it will sit, with Cancel while it goes and Retry if it doesn’t make it. In Quick capture, the same image attached twice stays attached once. Images are private to the workspace: a link to one is useless to anybody who can’t open the issue.

While editing, point at an image, click it or arrow onto it for Describe and Remove. A description is what screen readers say instead of the picture; described images carry a small ALT mark. ⌘/Ctrl+Z brings a removed image back.

Images count toward the workspace’s storage: 500 MB on Free, 10 GB on Solo Pro. See Plans and billing.

Discuss

Comments sit under the issue, in the Comments tab. The Comment button at the top of an open issue jumps there.

Write in “Add your two cents…”, then press Post comment or ⌘Enter.
The reply arrow (Reply to comment) starts a thread. Emoji reactions save everybody a “+1”.
The check (Resolve thread) folds a finished thread away without deleting it. On a resolved thread the check turns green; press it again (Reopen thread) to bring the thread back.
The pencil on your own comment edits it in place. Save with ⌘Enter, or back out with Esc. The comment keeps its spot and gets a quiet Edited next to its time. Only whoever wrote a comment can edit it, admins included.

The Guidance tab next to Comments shows which Playbook guides are attached to this issue for agents to read, and lets you attach or pin more.

Read the history

Show the receipts, next to the Comments heading, swaps comments for the full activity history: who changed what, and when, agents included. Back to comments returns.

A comment (not a reply) that starts with Handoff in bold marks where unfinished work was left. The newest one gets a line above the history with who wrote it, when, and how many updates came after it. Show handoff jumps to it, however far back it sits. Later updates don’t make a handoff wrong, but read them before you pick the work up. Agents get the same comment and count from list_activity with kind: "handoff".

When a title, description or comment changed, See what changed shows the exact before and after. Hide changes folds it up again. Every comment edit leaves an Edited a comment entry here, so nobody quietly rewrites the record.

Trash and restore

Move to trash… is in an open issue’s Actions menu, in a row’s menu and in the bar for several issues at once. Before it goes, Hydrant shows which issues it was blocking and what that means for them. Then press Move to trash, or Keep issue unchanged.

Trash keeps the content and the relationships, hides the issue from ordinary lists and stops it blocking anything. Restore issue, from the Trash view, brings it back along with its blocking effect.

What you should see

New issues land in Backlog as Needs refinement unless you chose otherwise. Edits show up straight away, and every one of them leaves a line in the history.

If it goes sideways

“Save didn’t land. Your draft did.” The network dropped. Your text is still in the editor. Press Retry save.
“This issue changed while you were editing.” Someone, or something, edited it while you were typing. Your draft is intact. Compare their version with yours before reapplying. Hydrant won’t pick a winner for you.
“Browser draft storage is unavailable.” Private windows and strict settings can do this. Drafts then live only in memory, so save before reloading.
“Image storage is full.” Remove images you don’t need, or check the limits under Settings › Usage.
Creation looked like it failed. Press Retry creation. It’s the same request, so you get one issue, not two.
“#128 changed since then. Your undo would flatten their edit.” Someone else edited the issue after your change. Open it, look, and change it yourself if you still want to. Undo never overwrites a newer edit.
“Undo would cancel #128 again…” Putting an issue back in Canceled would affect the issues it blocks. Cancel it from the issue, where you can review them first.
An issue vanished from your list. It may be in Trash, snoozed, or outside the view’s rules. Search its number in Find it.