Comment on Files in a Pull Request (Beta) Feedback

[willsmythe]

Commenting on a file in a pull request (not just a specific line) is available in public beta now generally available.

This feature lets you comment on deleted, binary (including images), and renamed files in a pull request. You can also comment generally about a changed code file without having to attach the comment to a specific line.

Learn more about commenting on a pull request (docss) or see the beta changelog for more details.

Known issues

• GitHub Mobile support is coming 🎉 SHIPPED 🎉
• API support is coming 🎉 SHIPPED 🎉

Tell us what you think

Let us know if you run into problems, have questions, have a request, or just wanna say how useful (or not) this feature is!

[austinbiggs]

Thank you for adding this feature, I typically leave general comments linked to the bottom line of a file; it'll be much nicer to leave a more general comment. 🙏🏻

[waldyrious]

My team in my previous company used to do something similar, but adding a comment to the first line of a file (which is also not ideal).

[giovanni-nabil]

yea me too, except that I put my comment in the middle of the file

[sjaramillo10]

@giovanni-nabil what if the file has an even number of lines? Where do you place your comment? 😆

[gypapp]

@giovanni-nabil what if the file has an even number of lines? Where do you place your comment? 😆

@sjaramillo10 Those files made this practice really cumbersome :)

[Fiaxhs]

Love this! This is going to be super useful 🥳

[devDohyun]

love this too, hooray ~🥳

[Alberto-MeloL]

hi

[daneah]

Love this direction! Feedback: It seems that leaving a file-level review comment on a deleted file right now shows that comment as Outdated and isn't displayed in the file view, only being visible in the conversation timeline.

[daneah]

I didn't force push that I know of! Is something indicating that I did, or just hypothesizing? Sorry, I misread the thread on mobile 😄 thanks a bunch!

[arthurljones]

I have a bit more data - after copying over all my full-file comments to new comments so they would show up inline, I didn't want to deal with the same issue again, so I went ahead and pushed a commit (I can always squash and merge). However, even just pushing a commit caused every full-file comment to be marked outdated, whether it was on a deleted file or not. Also, none of my files were moved.

[daneah]

Ah! I can bet that is what triggered mine as well.

[mminot-yseop]

More or less the same here:

1. I was doing a self-review of my code,
2. that review contained pending full-file comments.
3. I did a rebase+force-push to fix something,
4. I refreshed the PR-review page, finished my review, and submitted it.
5. All my full-file comments where suddenly “Outdated” even though the files on which those comments were did not change during the last push.
6. Now they only appear in the “Conversation” tab of the PR and it kinda defeats the purpose of full-file comments.

The overall feature idea is cool, but I’ll wait for it to be less outdatedness-prone before using it.

[hepcat72]

Well, this is weird, because all file comments for me get outdated on every push. It creates ao much extra work recreating comments that I went back to commenting on top lines of files instead of using this feature (making it less than useful). So I'm surprised to hear people couldn't reproduce this issue, even with force-pushes and directory moves. I had to restore comments on multiple files after multiple pushes on multiple PRs. I never experienced any file comment retained after a normal push and just gave up using it after a few PRs. This was the discussion I'd created about it:

https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/86527#discussioncomment-9575726

[oscar-balandran]

This is super useful, previously I needed to add generic comments mentioning files, now this will point to the exact file 👍

[mohammedgad]

I've always wanted this! thank you for adding it!

[rmacklin]

This is great!

In addition to:

This will allow you to comment on deleted, binary (including images), and renamed files in a pull request.

it also enables adding a comment on an empty file that was accidentally committed, which coincidentally I had to work around just a few hours ago, but now I can comment directly on it 🤩

Thanks!

[NewAlexandria]

Yes, this and binary file comments are not possible otherwise.

[rm3l]

Nice - thanks for implementing this!

[waltergalvao]

Awesome!

[enkhbateddie]

Great! 🚀

[josharian]

Hurrah! (A related ask: Can we get keyboard shortcuts to initiate a code comment--on a line or a file--when reviewing? Thanks.)

[ZhuZean]

A nice feature, I was adding comments for the first line of the file before 😭

[chathurangamdk]

Awesome feature..!!! I just used it on a PR.

[BGMP]

Really nice! Long awaited feature on my end!

[ionflow]

This will be great! There is a z-indexing issue currently.

[AurelienLoyer]

+1 on Arc Browser

[willsmythe]

Thanks! We'll get this fixed.

[willsmythe]

FYI. The fix for this rolled out earlier today.

[yonatankarp]

Looks great! until now I either left a comment on the 1st line or in a random place stating this it's not related specifically to this line 🙈

[willsmythe]

Thanks for the great feedback and overwhelming response to this feature! It's now generally available and also now available in GitHub Mobile.

[JayDi85]

Bug report on files review -- wrong z-order of "Comment on this file" popup hint:

Bug:

Correct:

[JayDi85]

Another bug report: wrong text hint on pending comments amount (if you move mouse over the number):

[blendotsequad]

](url)

[TiE23]

Today I ran into an issue. If I try to comment on a file while viewing a single commit in a PR, the comment area tries to open, but nothing is displayed.

While, on the other hand, if I review all the changes at once, it works as expected.

Short video demo:

Screen.Recording.2023-05-05.at.9.56.16.AM_compressed.mp4

[yermulnik]

I'm having exactly the same issue as described and screencasted though with commenting on files in already merged PRs.

[TWiStErRob]

On a related note: check annotations that are addressed to files (line 0) don't show up at the bottom of "Files changed"

https://github.com/TWiStErRob/net.twisterrob.cinema/pull/467/files

https://github.com/TWiStErRob/net.twisterrob.cinema/pull/467/checks?check_run_id=13881041239

[MaxBlazer]

When you leave a comment on a file, it's marked as outdated immediately after any (!) push. I don't think it's convenient. Comments at the file level are more “high-level”, so they should not disappear with frequent changes, this is annoying. For now I continue to leave comments on the first lines of the file.

Anyway, thank you for the feature.

[christophe-kamphaus-jemmic]

Do you mean any push with changes to that specific file or also a push only touching other files?
I would expect the comment to be marked outdated only for pushes that change the file of that comment.

[jsoref]

I wouldn't expect a file level comment to be outdated unless the file is no longer included in the changes for a PR (i.e. a force push drops changes to the file entirely).

[jsoref]

Here's an example: nasa/fprime#2316 (comment)

[hepcat72]

No, he means any push on the branch. I stopped using this feature too because of the same issue. When I push changes on any file, all file comments are outdated, whether those files have changes in them or not. It makes it a useless feature for tracking review issues when you have unresolved review comments. I had started a discussion on the issue here: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/86527#discussioncomment-9575726

[jsoref]

The PR view of a comment on a renamed file doesn't include the old filename, which is really problematic as I'm often commenting to show how a filename changed, consider dotnet/fsharp#16212 (comment):

Here's the files view which seems to have lost the comment:
https://github.com/dotnet/fsharp/pull/16212/files#diff-90709c7e722938d37a7ca0ca0d6093a6537b6ac85e566a2991ad21caff63faf6

[adamgall]

Is it possible to leave file-level comments on a Pull Request when viewing/managing that PR from the context of Github's browser-based code editor (can be opened by pressing . when viewing a PR)?

[jsoref]

Yes

[adamgall]

@jsoref Oh! I don't know how I missed that. Thank you!

[jsoref]

It isn't terribly obtrusive. I suspect this is the first time I've seen it -- so now I know it exists because you asked and I went looking -- it also wasn't the first place I looked, although in retrospect, its placement is logical and consistent with how the app works.

[github-actions[bot]]

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[JayDi85]

Some changed 1-2 weeks ago - now I can’t add comments in PR’s discussions with active pending review. All my new comments go to pending too. It’s very bad. Old version allow to comment directly or to pending. It was very useful. Please return that buttons.

[rmacklin]

That has not changed in the last few weeks. Once you've started a review all diff comments are pending until you submit or cancel the review (you can still post comments in the PR Conversation tab, unattached to the diff). This limitation has been in place for a long time (speaking from experience).

[llyyr]

Replies to a review comment aren't loaded in without refreshing the page, regular comments under PRs however are. This kind of behavior is unexpected, either replies to review comments should load in realtime or regular comments shouldn't be loaded in live as well.

[jakethekoenig]

Can we get more details about how to do this via API? When I look at the docs here for creating a review position/line aren't said to be required but when I omit them I get a 422 and a message saying 0.position is expected to be not null. Do I need to include another field to let the API know I want a file comment? When I make a file level comment through the UI and request the comment via api I see it has a line number of 1. I also notice from the docs the last supported api version is from 2022? Is there a beta flag I can pass to get new features?

[willsmythe]

Check out the docs for creating a review comment here:
https://docs.github.com/en/rest/pulls/comments?apiVersion=2022-11-28#create-a-review-comment-for-a-pull-request

You should only need to supply subject_type (as file) along with path, commit_id, and body. If this doesn't work let us know.