GitHub Desktop 3.0 brings better integration for your pull requests

Version control should be simple and easy, so you can focus on what matters. That’s why GitHub Desktop is designed to simplify workflows for millions of developers around the world. Today, GitHub Desktop hits a big milestone with the release of version 3.0, which includes improved support for git operations, like squashing, reordering, or amending commits, as well as exciting new features that bring GitHub closer to your local development workflow.

Review the status of your pull request check runs

With GitHub Desktop 3.0, you can now see the checks of your pull requests to ensure your code is ready for production. Just click on the badge with the pull request number, and start diving into the checks, jobs, and steps to better understand and fix whatever problem you might run into. You still can’t find out why your checks failed? Don’t worry! You can just re-run your checks to give them another chance to succeed. Users also now have the ability to re-run failed or individual GitHub Action checks.

Support for high-signal pull request notifications

Another addition to GitHub Desktop 3.0 is support for high-signal notifications. Hundreds of notifications across numerous apps are always trying to get our attention, and most of those notifications end up just being noise. That’s why GitHub Desktop 3.0 does not notify you for every single event in every repository you contribute to. Instead, GitHub Desktop 3.0 will only show you notifications when something really important happens in the repository you’re working on.

Pull request checks failed

Imagine you’re on a branch working on a new awesome feature, and at some point you’re ready to share it with your teammates for a more formal review. So, you push the branch to the repository and open a pull request. Immediately after, you switch to another branch to start working on another amazing feature.

However, a few minutes later, the checks required to merge your pull request failed, because you forgot to add a file to one of your commits. Not addressing the issue promptly could result in your teammates reviewing code different than what you intended to merge, or needing to ask them for an additional approval once the checks pass again.

GitHub Desktop 3.0 will show you a system notification when that happens, which will lead you to a new dialog with more detail about what went wrong with your pull request checks. This new dialog also makes it very easy to switch to the affected branch to start working on the fix, or just re-run those checks if you think it was a one-off. Thus, this will enable you to quickly get your pull request back on track for your teammates to review.

Pull request reviews

Now that your pull request checks are passing (hooray! 🎉), your teammates came up with some changes you need to make before the pull request can be merged. Very often, we want to address these comments sooner rather than later, so that we can get an approval and merge our pull request.

That’s why GitHub Desktop 3.0 now shows notifications when your pull requests are reviewed. Whether your teammates requested changes, approved, or just commented on your pull request, you will know instantly.

If someone requested changes or made some suggestions, you can quickly switch back to that branch and start working on them.

Once everyone is happy with your changes, you will get what you were looking for—the green checkmark that allows you to make that awesome feature available to users. Just click on the GitHub Desktop notification, read any final comments with the approval, then go straight to GitHub, and merge your pull request!

We hope these new notifications will help you and your team to be more efficient and effective, without bothering you with unnecessary distractions. Try them today by downloading GitHub Desktop!

Open source

A small team at GitHub is actively developing and maintaining GitHub Desktop. Yet thanks to its open source nature and to hundreds of developers around the world, it has grown and matured to its current state. With more than 32,000 commits and 4,600 pull requests, the GitHub Desktop repository has been forked more than 7,700 times and starred more than 14,400 times.

We have done our best to foster an inclusive environment where everyone feels comfortable contributing to the GitHub Desktop repository, and the result is having merged more than 1,000 pull requests from external contributors, with more than 8,500 issues created from users reporting bugs or requesting enhancements and new features. Thank you all for supporting GitHub Desktop throughout the years. We’re excited to continue to build together for years to come. ❤

Written by

Sergio Padrino

@sergiou87