Filter language

The Query button beside the filter menu. It opens with the current filter already written out, because a query language you have to learn before it shows you anything is one nobody learns.

assignee = me AND state != Done
priority in (urgent, high) AND due = overdue
project = WEB AND label in (design, ops)
is: open AND cycle = none

Fields

Field	Also spelled	Values
state	status	A state’s name
type	kind	A work-item type
is	group	backlog unstarted started completed cancelled, or done / open
priority	p	urgent high medium low none
assignee	assigned	A name, an email address, or me
label	tag	A label’s name
cycle	sprint	A cycle’s name
module	milestone	A module’s name
project		A key or a name
due		overdue today week none
text	title, summary	Anything

Operators

= :	is
!=	is not
in (a, b)	is one of
not in (a, b)	is none of
~	contains — text only

Joining clauses

Clauses join with AND, and writing it is optional: state = Todo priority = urgent works.

A bare word with no operator is a text search, which is what somebody typing into a filter box means nine times in ten.

none — or empty, or nobody — is the empty answer. assignee = none is the unassigned ones.

What it deliberately cannot do

A filter is a conjunction of is one of and is not one of. That is what a saved view stores, what the board reads, what a share link resolves and what the calendar feed queries — so the language is exactly that and no more.

OR between two different fields. assignee = me OR priority = urgent cannot be a saved view. The error says so and suggests the form that works: several answers to one field, priority in (urgent, high).

A date comparison. due < 2026-09-01 is not one of the four buckets a view holds. due < today and due <= 7d are accepted as ways of writing overdue and week, because those are what people type meaning them.

Sorting. ORDER BY is a separate control on the view.

Custom fields. They are named by an id, and field.7f3a… = x is text nobody can read or retype. A filter containing them keeps them untouched and the box says so, rather than pretending the query you can see is the whole picture. Use the menus for those.

Errors are the feature

A query language whose failure mode is returns nothing is one people stare at for five minutes. So an unresolvable name is an error with the word in it — No state here is called “Dnoe” — and the clauses that did parse are still applied.

The unresolved clause is kept rather than dropped, because a filter that quietly widens is worse than one that matches nothing and says which word is wrong.

It prints back

Whatever the dropdowns did prints into the box, and whatever you type comes back out as the same dropdown state. The two can never disagree.

The printed form is canonical: the same filter always prints the same text regardless of the order it was built in — which is what makes one of these worth pasting into a page, and worth diffing against last week’s.