Useful GitHub Issues overviews

I’ve always found the default, easily available views of GitHub Issues inadequate for my purposes. I want to separate issues by the kind of action I’ll want to take, but the interface is fundamentally oriented around a single list of issues, and by default that is just a big dump of every issue that involves you in some way. Luckily all the buttons are just UI over a query language, and the query language turns out to be just barely powerful enough to allow me to get the overviews I really want.

So here are the queries I’ve arrived at. Together they approximate a basic dashboard. Unfortunately there is not, to my knowledge, a keyword in the query language to refer to “whoever the currently logged in user is”, so I cannot demonstrate them as effectively as I’d like: you will have to manually edit them to subsitute your username for mine.

• user:ap -author:ap

  This shows all issues filed by others against my own repositories.

  Semantically, this one is “stuff waiting for me to fix”.

• user:ap author:ap

  This shows all issues I have filed on my own repositories.

  Semantically, this one is “my personal todo list”.

• author:ap -user:ap

  This shows all issues I have filed against repositores I do not own.

  Semantically, this one is “stuff I need to keep bugging others about”.

• commenter:ap -author:ap -user:ap

  This shows all issues filed by others against repositories I do not own, which I have nevertheless commented on.

  Semantically, this one is “stuff I care about as a bystander”.

• involves:ap -commenter:ap -author:ap -user:ap

  This shows all issues filed against repositories I do not own, which I have been mentioned in but have not commented on. There can be dross in here; I have a short username, and people importing content into GitHub sometimes trigger bogus mentions by having @ap somewhere in it. By isolating the things passively attached to me, I gain more use of the other queries.

  Semantically, this one is “stuff someone considers me relevant to (or maybe spam)”.

• Manual Subscriptions

  This one is not a GitHub Issues search query, but is useful to include in this context.

  Obviously this is stuff I’m not involved with but want to stay informed about.

That collection gives me a reasonable handle on everything I need to take care of one way or another, which I could not get from GitHub’s own built in views.

Update: I’ve split the last query, “involves:ap -author:ap -user:ap”, in two. Now it is divided on the source of my involvement as a bystander: myself or others.

Update: I’ve split the first query, “user:ap”, in two, to divide it on the origin of the issue: others or myself. I have also added a link to the issue subscriptions page.