Quick access to merge status anywhere in pull requests [public preview]

[ebndev]

We are rolling out the pull request merge status at the top of every pull request page! Check merge readiness from anywhere in the pull request experience, including the new "Files changed" page. Click to open the details so you can quickly identify blockers, missing approvals, and get your pull request ready to merge.

If you're still using the classic "Files changed" page, you'll need to opt into the new experience to view the merge status from this page. Learn more by checking out our changelog about the new experience.

Merge.status.button.mp4

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Join the discussion and leave feedback in the comments below!

[opti]

Did it intend to remove "Update with rebase" option from PR show page?

[broksonic21]

We’ve seen the update branch via rebase option disappear since this was released. See related thread on this: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/188567

Can this be addressed? Thanks!

[ebndev]

Hi @opti and @broksonic21, we appreciate you reaching out to report this issue! 

The GitHub team is aware of this and is working on a solution. We'll provide details when they're available in this discussion.

Please subscribe to that post to receive real-time notifications on updates. If you have further questions or additional details about your experience, please comment directly there as well.

[mpiorowski]

Love it! Dont need to scroll down everytime somethings change / breaks

[nigeldaniels]

Two things really bother me about this change.

First, the old need to scroll was not just pointless friction. It created a small amount of useful friction that made it more likely you would skim comments before merging. That mattered, because comments often contain the actual reason a PR should not be merged yet.

Second, the new visual hierarchy promotes the wrong signal. I have already seen people argue that the green check mark is accurate because their CI fully determines whether something is ready to merge. That may be true for some teams, but not for everyone, and probably not for most repositories on GitHub. A lot of repos do not have a sophisticated CI flow. In those repos, labels and comments are how people communicate whether a change is in review, ready to merge, blocked, or should not be merged. Making the green check larger and more prominent than those human signals gives the wrong impression.

And if a repo has little or no CI, the side panel is even worse because it takes up a large amount of space while adding little or no useful information.

[wagoodman]

This is great --one nit pick: I have a lot of vertical realestate but there is a small window which checks show up in, so I need to scroll to see all of them. I realize you're probably re-using the same component UI-wise, however, it would be much better if this component would eliminate the need to scroll so much in a small nested i-frame-like-thing to see all checks.

[vanessa-kalu]

Thanks for sharing this! We'll add this to our roadmap

[nigeldaniels]

Two things really bother me about this change.

First, the old need to scroll was not just pointless friction. It created a small amount of useful friction that made it more likely you would skim comments before merging. That mattered, because comments often contain the actual reason a PR should not be merged yet.

Second, the new visual hierarchy promotes the wrong signal. I have already seen people argue that the green check mark is accurate because their CI fully determines whether something is ready to merge. That may be true for some teams, but not for everyone, and probably not for most repositories on GitHub. A lot of repos do not have a sophisticated CI flow. In those repos, labels and comments are how people communicate whether a change is in review, ready to merge, blocked, or should not be merged. Making the green check larger and more prominent than those human signals gives the wrong impression.

And if a repo has little or no CI, the side panel is even worse because it takes up a large amount of space while adding little or no useful information.

[robertkirkman]

nigeldaniels, I understand your comments' general sentiment, but I have a feeling that this change is aimed towards repositories where PRs are "ready to merge" as soon as they are green, which does not fully accommodate most repositories, like you said. Maybe this button should be optional for repositories and possible for them to disable in the repository settings.

[nigeldaniels]

nigeldaniels, I understand your comments' general sentiment, but I have a feeling that this change is aimed towards repositories where PRs are "ready to merge" as soon as they are green, like you said. Maybe this button should be optional for repositories and possible for them to disable in the repository settings.

I understand that perspective but this is unlikely to be the case for most repos and so this should not be the default.
GitHub became trusted because it worked well for small teams and ordinary developers, not just repositories with highly structured CI workflows. This change feels like a step away from that.

[asherone0]

Did this change remove the Edit button that allows changing the base branch for a pull request?

[kostasmanionis]

Had to come here to figure out how to change the base branch.

[ianh-apheris]

Also struggled to find this - wasn't obvious from the UI

[nick-brady]

annnd thats why i'm here as well..

[vanessa-kalu]

Thanks everyone! We've received a lot of feedback about this and we'll update this to make it easier to find

[octaviotastico]

The pencil icon placement is a bit misleading in my opinion, I assumed it only allowed editing the title, not the base branch.
Thanks anyways for the help!

[josemfche]

Useful 👍🏽

[Zalathar]

This change is visually awful.

For the repositories I interact with, it just means that there is now a giant distracting red X at the top of every single PR, which conveys no useful information and is not actionable.

Please bear in mind that some repositories use an alternative mechanism to approve merges, and this change hurts anyone involved with those repositories.

[Zalathar]

Unfortunately this is not the first design change to shove a gigantic unhelpful red element in the user's face. We had similar problems with the overhaul of the merge status box at the bottom of the page.

[Zalathar]

Also the CSS for this new button is a total mess, making it impractical to perform any kind of client-side accessibility adjustment.

[Zalathar]

Having this slowly-loading item animate in the corner of the page also makes the PR page unusable for several seconds.

That causes every PR page load to be substantially slower in practice, which is very frustrating.

[gps035]

If there's room on the screen, I think the status of more checks should be displayed. It seems odd to require scrolling the in list of checks when there's a lot of whitespace below the merge button

[vanessa-kalu]

@gps035 I agree. we'll fix this in an upcoming release :)

[Camaromelt]

Nice change.

[fishmonger45]

Minor copy: When a PR is missing a review the language is forwardly geared to "Awaiting approval". It should perhaps be something neutral like "Awaiting review"?

[trongtai37]

Combining this view with the Overview info of the PR would be better

[rneatherway]

I like this change so far, thank you for working on this. One suggestion: as a reviewer I would like to be able to submit my review from this widget too. It feels natural that as it says Awaiting approval that I should be able to do this here.

[vanessa-kalu]

Good point! We have a few updates coming up that will address this

[PranjalManhgaye]

it's really nice

[Wirone]

This change is nice, BUT would be much more helpful if the button was visible all the time when scrolling (within the banner containing PR's status, title etc). Right now you can jump into checks when you're either top of the page (button triggering side panel) or bottom (widget). When you're in the middle, you just have to jump top/bottom anyway, and lose the current context you're in.

PS. it works like this in diff tab, but not in conversation tab.

[vanessa-kalu]

@Wirone Thanks! We made this update recently to the Files changed tab. We're currently working on implementing this across all tabs

[biast12]

I would absolutely love to be able to trigger workflows via buttons in that view, for an example we got a workflow for @claude to review our PRs, and if we need to get them reviewed again then we mention @claude in the PR, would LOVE if we could just open the quick access view and trigger/run a review that way

[cee-dub]

The wording here is confusing when combined with GHA checks that need approval to run. It wasn't immediately obvious this was for e.g. a required review.

[mrserb]

Looks fine!

[matthdsm]

The "edit" button to change the source branch in PR's seems to have disappeared

[lajczi]

pretty cool

[lucaswalter]

Not a fan

[JosiahParry]

As it stands this feature shouldn't be continued.

The awaiting approval is good but there is literally no action i can take after pressing it.

This floating sidebar just replicates what is already on the PR page.

I still have click Files Changed and Submit Review to approve.

What it should do

I should be able to approve or request changes directly from this tab. Otherwise, this feature is pure bloat

[JosiahParry]

I'd note that I'm getting a "Ready to Merge" badge even though the PR is not approved. This is super misleading and patently not true! If its all green that doesn't mean it can be merged.

[nigeldaniels]

I really hate this change.

Even the green check mark at the top is misleading. A green check implies that everything is good to go, but it is now larger and placed higher on the page than the labels. People have used labels for years to communicate states like “in review,” “ready to merge,” and “do not merge.” This new layout makes the check mark feel more authoritative than the labels, even when the labels are the more meaningful signal for the team’s actual workflow.

Also, if a repo has no CI, the side panel is just a giant blob of nothing that covers a huge portion of the page and adds no value.

Please I beg you! just make the site faster don't change the UI at all please.

[nigeldaniels]

If I was not clear the reason the merge button is at the bottom and should FOREVER stay at the bottom is so people can READ before merging!

[victorbstan]

How do I edit the merge target FFS

[JosiahParry]

I cant find all of the comments i need to resolve...
what is the purpose of this window if it just shows me things that are already shown?

[anshulsahni]

This tool bar has very less usage for me, all the beneft I can see is that option to merge the PR to check the status of actions is available to me at the top of the screen, so I don't have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page, but frankly speaking that is not even an effort, it just takes half a second to do that, even in PRs having lot of updates/comments/commits.

The main pain point it could have solved was the actions not available or visible properly in conversations page, like approving the PR, most of the times PRs are so small that description itself is enough for me to know that this can directly be approved or probably I have seen this PR hundred times and now I just have to click the button to approve it, that is when it irritates me that I have to go all the way to files tab and approve PR from there.

Another usage, as highlighted in some other comments, is also to show unresolved conversations directly here, which would be very useful because

[antoine-chopin]

This is bugged, I can't submit comments anymore because they are "pending review" and once the PR is "ready to merge" there is no way to "submit" my review

[LawanIdriss]

To me, it's actually a great feature. One concern: sometimes it's immediately closing the Quick Access pane after merged, not able to delete branch on the pane.

[justinmchase]

I love this, but please let me approve without having to switch to the code.

[tyukiand]

"Squash and merge" is now buried in some sub-popup somewhere on the side under some button at the top, so now I have to scroll all the way up to squash and merge. This was literally the last button in the entire UI that was still useful for something.