Easy path to create an issue from GitHub Desktop

Describe the feature or problem you’d like to solve

In https://github.com/desktop/desktop/issues/2376, @TheGrimSilence proposed an idea to be able to create issues in GitHub Desktop. Generally we’ve felt like an integrated approach goes too far in the direction of in-app project management, but we do frequently hear that in the context of doing your work, if you see something that warrants creating a new issue, there’s not a great path for that currently without causing considerable context switching and related cognitive overhead.

Proposed solution

Our proposal here is to create a menu item and associated keyboard shortcut to direct people to the correct issue creation path on GitHub.com. This is dependent on a single path that accounts for repositories that use issue templates and those that do not, which doesn’t currently exist but hopefully will in the near future.

This menu item should live in the Repository menu.

Considerations

1. This is dependent on work on GitHub.com that provides a common path that satisfies the use case of repositories that use issue templates and those that do not. Currently the path would need to be /issues/new/choose for repositories using templates, and /issues/new for those not using templates.
2. We’ll have to determine how to handle the cases where repositories do not have issues enabled at all (which is true for newly created forks by default - thanks @Rexogamer).

[Kruithne]

@billygriffin That makes a lot of sense, I appreciate the clarification. Even knowing the mindset behind the choice I still hope one day the team will reconsider this. I agree that GitHub Desktop should not replace the browser version; there’s a lot of stuff that GitHub offers that could happily remain on the web version as they’re not integral to a development workflow. For example, setting up actions or adjusting templates isn’t something that’s done with excessive frequency.

When it comes to issues, I still strongly believe this should be a core feature in GitHub Desktop and would excel it’s value as an every-day development tool. Maybe I am bias due to workflows I am familiar with, but for me cross-referencing between the code-base and GitHub issues is almost as frequent as actually committing changes.

When it comes to making commit messages, I will almost always need GitHub open side-by-side with GitHub Desktop to recall an issue ID or add relevant details to a commit, which requires flicking between, rather than simply being able to have issues on the right-hand side as an alternative view to the file diff, as one example of the frequent usage.

Either way, thank you for the clarification! I hope one day the team will reconsider. 👍

[digitalentropy]

I’d like to chime in here and say that it feels like a glaring omission that there is no ability to comment on, or manage issues in the desktop client considering it’s such a integral part of team-based development. There are plenty of folks who for different reasons do not leave their browser logged into web apps (clearing all cookies automatically).

Please, please, add this. I don’t understand why there is such extreme resistance to it, other than trying to dictate to others how they should work.