Group, filter, sort

Three controls at the top of any list of tasks. They compose, they survive a layout switch, and what they produce can be saved under a name.

Group by

Group by	Useful for
State	The default. On a board, this is the workflow
Priority	What is actually urgent, rather than what is loud
Assignee	Who has too much. Drag between columns to hand work over
Label	Where the work is going
Cycle	What is in this sprint and what is not
Project	On any screen that spans more than one
A custom field	Any Select, Multi-select, Checkbox or Person field

Grouping by a custom field and then dragging a card between columns writes the answer to that field, which is the thing most people find by accident and then use every day.

The same tasks as the board, grouped by priority instead of state. The add button at the end of a group creates a task already in it.

Filter

The menus cover every field, including custom ones. A filter is a conjunction of is one of and is not one of — several answers to one field are OR, and different fields are AND.

That is not an arbitrary limit; it is exactly what a saved view stores, what the board reads, what a share link resolves and what the calendar feed queries. Making the filter menus richer than the thing they are describing would produce filters that cannot be saved.

Sort

Separate from grouping. Sort within groups by any field, ascending or descending, plus a manual order that dragging writes — which is what “the backlog is in priority order because somebody put it in that order” needs.

Write the filter as text instead

The Query button beside the filter menu opens a box with the current filter already written out:

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

The box and the dropdowns are two views of one thing. Whatever the menus did prints into the box; whatever you type comes back out as the same menu state. 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, or diffing against last week’s.

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

Errors name the word

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. A query language whose failure mode is returns nothing is one people stare at for five minutes.

The complete grammar, the fields, the operators and the four things it deliberately cannot do are in the filter reference.

Display options

A fourth, smaller menu: which fields show on a card or a row, whether to show sub-tasks nested or flat, whether empty groups appear, and whether completed work is hidden. These are per-view and saved with it.