A search shortcut, a clearer Sync button, and telling you when GitLab or GitHub is down

Four smaller changes, all about the board telling you what's going on.

Press / to search the board

Press / anywhere on a board and focus jumps to its search box, with anything already in it selected so you can type over it. Esc still clears the box, as before.

The shortcut stays out of your way: it does nothing while you're typing in another field or while a dialog is open. If you use speech input and a spoken "slash" keeps moving you to search, turn it off in Settings → Board display → Press / to search the board. It's on until you turn it off.

No Status badge in a Status column

On a board whose columns are statuses (a GitLab board with Status columns, or a GitHub board that follows a Project), every card used to carry a Status badge naming the column it was already in. Cards in a Status column now drop it. The badge stays where it tells you something: on cards in label columns, and on cards whose status has no column of its own.

The Sync button knows when a sync is already running

Before, the Sync button only noticed a sync you had started from that tab. If the background sync, a teammate or you in another tab had one going, the button still offered itself, and a click just queued up behind the sync already running.

Now, while any sync of the board is running:

• the button spins, says Syncing..., and is greyed out, Full Sync included;
• on wider screens, Sync in progress takes the place of "Last synced" and the countdown to the next one;
• hovering the button explains why: "A sync of this board is already running. Sync again once it finishes."

The button picks this up when the board next refreshes: every few seconds on Pro and Team, every 30 seconds on Free. Full details are in the Sync and real-time guide.

When GitLab or GitHub is down, the pill says so

When GitLab or GitHub is having a bad day, answering with server errors or not answering at all, your board keeps working from its last synced cards. But the sync pill used to turn to Sync error and show you the raw error, something like "GitLab API error after 3 retries: 503 Service Unavailable", which reads as though something on your board is broken.

The pill still turns to Sync error, but open it and it now says:

GitLab isn't responding properly right now. The board keeps its last synced cards and will catch up on the next successful sync.

The original error is still there, in small print underneath, if you want it. There's nothing to fix and no button to press: syncing keeps retrying on its own, and the error clears with the next sync that gets through.

Requests that time out now count as the provider not answering too, not just server errors. So if you move a card while GitLab is down, you get "GitLab didn't respond properly, so we couldn't move this card. Try again shortly." rather than a generic failure.