Your Mac GitHub Issues Client

Power through your issues easier and faster with a native client.

GitHub Issues is a great tool to stay connected with your team — but sometimes it’s a little too basic. You need a tool that has the right balance of simplicity and power.

Navigating the website can be frustrating, cumbersome and slow. And what happens when you have multiple projects that you want to refer to? You need to open a new browser tab for each of them and switch back and forth between them like an animal.

GitHub Issues is also famously very bare-bones when it comes to implementing advanced features like categorisation or filtering. At some stage, when your list of issues grows to a certain point — you’re going to need more than just labels to organise your issues.

I would look longingly at tools like Things and Omnifocus and think — why can’t I use something like that!

Bee was designed to let you quickly and easily navigate through your issues, do your stuff, and then get straight out. Because managing issues shouldn’t be a chore and it shouldn’t be something that you dread.

Bee is built on the best frontend technologies (Core Animation and AppKit) to help it deliver on its goal of a beautiful, lightning fast and straightforward tool that you look forward to using.

I’ve been continuously designing and redesigning Bee for the last 8 years to create a tool that doesn’t impede your workflow. The home page for Bee gives a great overview of its powerful features. But there are also some specific GitHub Issues features that bear mentioning here.

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Instant Search

Start typing and Bee immediately begins a search across your issues, comments, labels and projects. It’s a fuzzy search so just type away without worrying about how exact your search term is.

When you search for particular labels, those are matched exactly so you can easily drill-down to a list of issues that you’re interested in.

Smart Lists

Remember what I was saying about lack of categorisation and filtering? Well, Bee has you covered here with Smart Lists.

You can create your own rules that organise your issues into something a lot more manageable. You have rules that can filter by Assignee, Milestone and Label as well as numerous other predicates that are defined inside of Bee.

Milestones

You can create and edit Milestones directly inline. Just make sure you’re grouping by Milestone (View > Group By > Milestone). Then hit Command + Shift + N to insert a new Milestone.

If you need to edit a Milestone, just hover over one and a settings icon will appear to the right of the title. Click that and you can begin editing.

Markdown Editor

Bee has a crazy-good Markdown editor that was built from scratch. It doesn’t need an additional preview step after you’re done writing because as you’ll soon find out — what you type and mark-up is what you see immediately.

GitHub-Flavoured Markdown is of course supported and you can create and modify Task Lists beautifully as well.

Keyboard Shortcuts

You can hit Command + Shift + A to quickly edit an issue’s assignees.

You can also hit Command + Shift + T to quickly close an open issue or vice-versa.

There are also many other keyboard shortcuts available throughout the UI.

Window Management

Open multiple issues and projects in their own windows simultaneously. It’s not such a drastic idea for the desktop, but for something that used to live solely inside of a web browser — this is a bit revolutionary.

You can collapse windows down into just a single list of issues if you want to focus in on a particular subset.

There are a multitude more ways that you can organise and customise Bee to adapt to your workflow.