Finding things#

There are two very different questions you ask a tracker. The first is "where is that one thing?" — a ticket someone mentioned in a meeting, the runbook you wrote last spring, a colleague's name. The second is "what does all the work of a certain shape look like?" — every open bug in two projects, everything due this week, everything nobody has picked up.

Hinata answers the first with the command palette, and the second with the Issues list. Learning which one to reach for is most of the skill.

Open the palette from anywhere#

Press ⌘K on a Mac, Ctrl+K on Windows and Linux. Both combinations work on every platform — the hint printed on screen simply names the key your keyboard actually has.

You can also click the Search or jump to… field in the top bar. It looks like a text field but behaves like a button: clicking it opens the same palette. On a phone the field becomes a magnifier icon in the top bar, and the palette slides down as a full-screen sheet instead of floating in the middle of the window.

The palette opens over whatever you were doing. Nothing you have half-typed is lost, nothing scrolls away behind it. Press Esc, or click the dimmed background, and you are exactly where you were.

One query, everything at once: the scope chips carry a count each (9 commands, 57 issues, 3 projects, 6 people), matches are highlighted wherever they occur, and every row shows what tells it apart — an issue its key and status, a sprint its goal, an article its space and age. One row is always selected, so Enter opens it. The bar along the bottom names the only three keys you need.

What it searches#

Start typing and results arrive grouped, always in the same order, so your eye learns where to look:

Two kinds of matching run at once, and it is worth knowing the difference because it explains results that would otherwise look inconsistent. Partial matches work on the short fields — typing len finds Lena, HIN-2 finds HIN-241, half a project name finds the project. Whole words are additionally matched inside the long fields: descriptions and article bodies. So a fragment of a word will find a title but not a sentence buried in a description; type the whole word for that.

In the default All view each group shows up to five results. Pick a single group and you get up to twenty-four.

Narrow it to one kind of thing#

The row of chips under the search field — All, Commands, Issues, Projects, People, Boards & Sprints, Knowledge — restricts the search to one category.

Each chip carries the number of items of that kind that exist: 57 issues, 3 projects, 6 people, 4 boards, 8 articles. With Knowledge picked and the field still empty, the palette browses instead of searching — the most recently touched articles, each with the space it lives in and how long ago it changed.

Click a chip, or press Tab to walk forward through them and Shift+Tab to walk back. Your query stays in the field while you switch, so you can type once and then flick between "did I mean the issue or the article?".

The keyboard is the point#

The best match is already selected when results land, so the common case is: press ⌘K, type four characters, press Enter. Moving the mouse over a row selects it too, which means you can start on the keyboard and finish with a click without the highlight jumping around.

Read the results before you open them#

Each row carries enough context to answer "is this the one?" without opening anything, and the shape of a row tells you what kind of thing it is:

• An issue shows its type glyph, its key in a monospaced face, a coloured status dot with the status name, and the assignee's avatar on the right. Three tickets with nearly identical titles are told apart by their status and their owner, right there in the list.
• A project shows a coloured hexagon with the project key, how many issues are open and how many are done, and the faces of its members.
• A person shows their avatar and their job title.
• A board or sprint shows its name and, for a sprint, its goal — which is usually more recognisable than the sprint number.
• An article shows which space it lives in and how long ago it was updated, so a stale duplicate is obvious before you read it.

Recent searches#

Open the palette with an empty field and it shows the last six terms you actually used.

Under Recent searches, most recent first, with Clear on the right. A term is recorded when you open one of its results, not while you type — so the list holds the searches that led somewhere.

Clicking one puts it back in the field and runs it again; it does not jump straight to a result, because a search you repeat is usually a search you want to look through again. Recents are stored on the device you are using, so your phone and your laptop remember different things.

It is also a command bar#

The palette is not only a search box. Type what you want to do and it offers to do it:

• Go to Dashboard, Projects, Issues, Board, Timeline, Reports, Knowledge — the whole navigation, without aiming at the sidebar.
• Create new issue — takes you to the board, where every column carries an Add issue composer at its foot.
• Toggle light / dark appearance — flips the theme. This one deliberately leaves the palette open, so you can look at the result and flip back if you dislike it.

Commands are matched on your own device and appear instantly, before results come back from the server. You do not have to type the label exactly: "dark", "theme" and "appearance" all find the theme switch.

Where the answers come from#

Everything the palette shows comes from your own server. There is no external index, nothing is sent anywhere else, and the results are as fresh as the data — an issue someone renamed a minute ago is findable under its new title.

The app waits a fraction of a second after your last keystroke before asking, and throws away answers that a newer keystroke has already made obsolete. That is why results settle a beat after you stop typing rather than flickering through every intermediate word, and why a slow connection never leaves you looking at the results for car when you have typed carbon.

Commands are the exception: they are matched on your device, so they appear the instant you type, even before the server has replied.

When nothing comes back#

If the palette says it has no matches, work through this in order:

1. Is a scope chip still active? A chip you pressed earlier stays pressed. Press All to widen again.
2. Is it a fragment of a long word? Fragments match titles, keys and labels — not the text inside descriptions and articles. Try the whole word.
3. Is it archived? Prefix the query with archived.
4. Is it in a project you can reach? Access to projects comes from your project membership and from your teams. If a colleague can see something you cannot, that is the reason — ask them to add you, or see Projects and teams.

The palette on a phone#

On a phone the palette takes the whole screen, sliding down from the top, with the field at the top under your thumb and the keyboard already up. The scope chips scroll sideways, results fill the rest, and the keyboard-hint footer is dropped because there is no keyboard to hint at. Everything else — scopes, recents, the archive keyword, commands — behaves exactly as it does on a desktop. More about the phone layout in On your phone.

Six things people actually look for#

"Someone mentioned HIN-42 and I need to read it." Type the key. Case does not matter, and you do not need all of it — hin-4 already narrows the list. Press Enter on the top hit.

"I remember a phrase from the description, not the title." Type the phrase as whole words. Descriptions and article bodies are searched too, so "certificate rotation" finds the ticket whose title says nothing of the sort. If nothing comes back, drop to the single most distinctive word — long-field matching is word-by-word, not fragment-by-fragment.

"I want everything in one project." Search the project by name, press Enter on it, and you land on the Issues list already filtered to that project. From there use Filter and Group by to carve it up.

"Nobody has picked this up, have they?" Open Issues, then Filter → Assignee → Unassigned. Add Status if you only care about work that has already started. This is the query that finds the things quietly rotting at the bottom of a backlog.

"What did I touch last week?" Filter → Assignee → you, Sort → Last modified (new), Time range → Last 7 days. Group by project if you work across several and want the answer split by area.

"It was deleted — or was it?" Nothing you archive is really gone. Type archived followed by what you are looking for — archived login bug — and the palette searches the archive instead of the live workspace, across archived issues and archived projects. Type archived on its own to see the most recently archived items. The German word archiviert works the same way, whichever language your app is set to.

Issue keys are addresses#

Every issue has a short, permanent key: the project's key, a dash, and a number — HIN-42. It is the thing to paste into a chat message, a commit message or a document, because it is short enough to read aloud and unique across the whole server.

On the web app you can go straight to …/browse/HIN-42 and land on that issue. In the desktop and mobile apps, typing the key into the palette does the same job in fewer keystrokes.

Keys survive a move. If an issue is moved to another project it is renumbered — but the old key keeps working, in the palette, in browse links, and in every article or issue that already referenced it. A link you wrote a year ago does not rot because someone reorganised the projects.

When you need a list, not a jump#

The Issues page is the other half of finding things. It shows every issue in every project you have access to, newest activity first, and pages more in as you scroll. Four controls shape it.

The Issues page: 57 issues across every project you can see, the four view controls above the table, and Export on the right. The Search or jump to… field with its ⌘K badge sits in the top bar on every screen.

Reading a row#

Each row is one issue: its key, the title with a glyph for its type, its status, its priority, its assignee, and its due date. Two of those columns are doing more work than they look:

• Due speaks in relative terms while that is useful and in dates once it is not — 3d overdue and Today in red, then Tomorrow, then 5d for anything inside the coming week, then a plain date. You can scan a hundred rows for trouble without reading a single calendar date.
• Title carries a small counter when the issue has sub-tasks — 0/1, 3/4 — so a parent that looks finished but is not says so before you open it.

Clicking anywhere on a row opens the issue.

Shaping the list#

Filter opens a popover with five facets — Status, Priority, Assignee, Project and Type — plus an Archived switch. Within one facet the choices are alternatives: picking Bug and Task shows both. Between facets they add up: Bug plus In Progress plus Lena shows only Lena's in-progress bugs.

One choice in Status and one in Assignee: each facet chip carries its own count, the footer reads 2 active, and the page header counts what survived — 3 of 11 issues. Long facets get a search field of their own, and Clear all in the footer empties every facet at once.

Group by breaks the list into labelled sections. Grouping by assignee before a stand-up turns the list into a per-person agenda; grouping by project turns it into a portfolio view.

One dropdown rather than a row of controls, with a tick on the grouping in force. The button reads Group by while it is None and takes the grouping's own name once you pick one.

Sort orders the whole result set, not just the rows you have scrolled to: newest first, oldest first, or by last modified in either direction. The default is most recently touched first.

Time range narrows by date. It reads dates the way you would: an issue with a start and a due date matches when its span overlaps the window, an issue with only one of the two matches when that date falls inside it, and an issue with neither falls back to when it was last touched, so unscheduled work still surfaces.

Overdue and today at the top, rolling windows in the middle, Custom range… at the foot — that last row opens a calendar where you pick the window yourself. Like Group by, the button renames itself to whichever preset is active.

Filters that arrive with a link#

Some links carry a filter with them. The tiles on your dashboard are the clearest example: clicking Today's tasks opens the Issues list already narrowed to what is due by today, and the number you clicked matches the number of rows you get. Clicking through a project card does the same for that project.

In the web app the address bar carries that scope, so a link you copy from it opens for a colleague filtered the way it was for you.

Taking the results with you#

Export writes the complete filtered set, not just the rows you have scrolled into view — the app pages through the whole result on the server first.

Three formats behind the Export pill on the right of the toolbar: Export as PDF is a printable table carrying your organisation's name and logo, Export as CSV is for a spreadsheet, Export as JSON for anything that needs to read it back.

The file lands in your Downloads folder, and the app tells you the file name it used.

Navigating by hierarchy instead of searching#

Some things are easier to walk to than to search for. Work in Hinata nests three levels deep — an epic holds stories, tasks, bugs and features, and each of those can hold sub-tasks — and every level is navigable:

• Every issue shows a breadcrumb above its title. The ancestors are clickable, so one hop takes you from a sub-task to its parent and another to the epic that frames both.
• A parent lists its child issues and its sub-tasks in panels of their own, with a progress count. If you know the epic, you never need to search for anything inside it.
• On a board, Group by → Epic turns the columns into swimlanes, one per epic. It is the fastest way to see a whole initiative at once, including the parts of it nobody is working on.

When you do need to attach something to a parent, the epic and parent pickers open with recent epics and recent issues already listed — the thing you want is usually one of the last few you touched.

Looking for a person#

People results match on display name, username and job title, so "Vogt", "lvogt" and "Designer" all find the same colleague. It is a quick way to check who holds a role you only know by description.

To see a person's work rather than their profile, go the other way round: open Issues, filter by Assignee, and group by project or status. The board's People filter does the same thing for a single board, which is what most stand-ups actually need.

Link once, search less#

The best search is the one you never have to run. Whenever you write a description, a comment or an article, type @ and pick the issue, article or person you mean. What lands in the text is a live link: it shows the issue's real title and status, it opens the issue when clicked, and it feeds the panels that connect things together — Linked issues at the foot of an article, Documented in on the issue itself.

Typing HIN-42 as plain characters gives you none of that. It is readable, and someone can paste it into the palette, but the two things stay strangers. One extra keystroke turns a mention into a connection, and it pays back every time somebody else goes looking. See Writing documentation for what those links do once they exist.

Finding things elsewhere#

Search does not only live in the palette:

• The board has its own filter, with facets the global list does not need — sprint, author, label and epic — plus a people filter for narrowing to one or two colleagues. See Boards and sprints.
• The knowledge base has a search field over the top of its own space grid, matching article titles, space names and labels. See Writing documentation.
• Watched collects the issues you asked to follow, which is often the shortest path back to work in progress. See Staying informed.
• Inside an issue, the @ menu searches issues, articles and people so you can link one to another while you write.

Next steps#

• Learn what you can do with what you found in Working with issues.
• Shape the same work visually in Boards and sprints.
• Write the runbook the palette will find next time in Writing documentation.