Improved pull request "Files Changed" experience feedback

[Akash1134]

About the new experience

This updated experience focuses on performance, accessibility, and user productivity. Read more in the changelog.

Tip

If you are not already using the new experience, click the ✨Try the new experience in the upper-right corner of the classic "Files changed" page. You can easily switch back from the Preview menu.

✨ What's new

If you are coming from the classic experience, the new experience should feel familiar but adds some significant improvements:

• Comment on any line: You can now comment on any line of a changed file, not just the lines surrounding a change.
• View the description without switching pages: You can now view the pull request description from the new Overview panel on the "Files changed" page.
• Reviewing made easier
  • Enhanced file tree: The file tree is now resizable with indicators showing the files with comments, errors, and warnings.
  • Review your pending comments: Pending comments are now shown in the review submission panel, so you can double-check your feedback before submitting.
  • Draft comments: New comments and replies are saved locally so you won't lose them if you accidentally close your browser or refresh the page.
• Fewer page reloads: Clicking Refresh to pull in new changes, switching between split and unified modes, and other tasks will no longer force a full page refresh.
• Accessibility & readability: Keyboard navigation, screen reader landmarks, and increased line spacing options are now available to make the experience available to everyone.

✨ Updates

See what's been fixed and improved since the launch of the public preview:

• June 26: initial changelog
• July 17: file-level commenting, performance fixes, diff loading and expansion issues, and more
• July 31: rich diff support, improve file tree ordering, and more
• August 21: improved review submission panel usability, submodule support, and lots of fixes
• September 11: temporary single file view to improve scale (see message above)
• September 25: commenting on unchanged lines 🎉 , single file mode improvements, and more
• November 6: apply suggested changes in a batch, collapsible annotations, and more
• November 20: new Overview panel (for viewing PR description), performance and other fixes
• December 11: review by commit, improved commit filtering, filtering improvements, and more
• January 23, 2026: default experience for all users, new experimental mode that uses virtualization to support larger pull requests (up to 3,000 files)
• February 5, 2026: CODEOWNERS validation support added, additional performance improvements

🟡 Limitations

As of the initial public preview release, there are some temporary limitations that will be addressed over time:

• Annotations on unchanged files
• Small screen (e.g. mobile device) responsive layout

While our previous experience had hard limits on large PRs, this new experience is being built to scale. That said, we’re increasing our limits incrementally. To start with, our additional current limitations are:

• Limited to 1,000 files in single file mode or 3,000 in experimental mode
• Comments: 40 in the page (but up to 350 in the Comments side panel)
• Replies per comment: 20
• Alerts: 50

How you can help

1. Report bugs, edge cases, or usability pain points in the replies (screenshots/gifs welcome).
2. Tell us which future enhancements would make the biggest impact on your workflow.

Thanks for helping us build a better review experience—we read every comment!

[willmarcondeseso]

I would like to be able to scroll through the Pull Request while the comment modal is open.

Reason: When a comment is outdated, we need to look at the current version to check if it actually addresses the comment.

I really love this feature! THANK YOU!!!

[Frames254]

Yes

YES

OKAY

REALLY

[Frames254]

Yes
wHY

YES

OKAY

REALLY

[Abdullah9990]

Yes

[Baxrom0311]

yes

[m1sea]

hha

[rtalexk]

Update: I just found out that it appears when there's enough space (1280px width). Here's the updated feedback.

I'd like to see the branch name in the sticky header at all times so that I can easily copy it when I'm reviewing a PR.

---

I wrote the following before thoroughly experimenting.

I'd like to see the branch name when the sticky header is shown (i.e., when you've scrolled to the bottom).

The reason is that when I'm reviewing a long PR and want to checkout the branch to continue reviewing it locally, I have to go back all the way up to see or copy the branch name and then go back to where I left off.

[albertoblaz]

Similarly, I miss having a sticky bar below the PR's title to have the "Conversation" tab/button visible without having to scroll bar to the top.

Alternatively, users could still do Cmd+Up to scroll up and then click on the tab, but doing so doesn't scroll if the focus is on the diff panel, so you need to click on the files sidebar or the page margins and then use the shortcut.

It's not a critical issue, but a little annoying.

[pakeeza2425]

I know exactly what you mean — the old sticky bar made it so much quicker to jump back to the Conversation tab. Right now the extra scrolling or focus-shifting adds friction, especially during long reviews. A persistent header or sticky navigation with the tabs always visible would be a nice quality-of-life improvement. Not critical, but definitely one of those small things that would make the workflow feel smoother.

[duduedufsa]

This update focuses on three essential pillars of a modern code review experience: performance, UX, and accessibility.

Optimized diff rendering with reduced memory consumption.

[Endy0611]

This update focuses on three essential pillars of a modern code review experience:
performance, user experience, and accessibility.

We’ve optimized diff rendering to significantly reduce memory consumption,
resulting in faster load times and smoother navigation when reviewing large
pull requests.

[vivoysg372-source]

Default auto goto V2344

[rtalexk]

I find the comment indicators in the sidebar really useful. It might also be useful to have them in the "diff file header."

It's very useful when you've marked a file as "viewed" because you can see how many comments it has as you're scrolling without having to expand it.

[iifeiss780-wq]

https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/5486

[dcumings]

[shrynshjn]

this is not showing up for me, rather i am getting a comment option on the pr level, having it on a file level would really be great, current i open two split windows to check my older comments and the latest code.

[eengelhardt]

this is happening for me too.

Some comments are showing up in file and some are not

[xiangsgao]

where is the copilot here?

[rtalexk]

Seamlessly switch between split and unified views.

This is really cool. Is it also possible to seamlessly toggle hiding white spaces? If that's achievable without doing a refresh would be amazing.

[Primajin]

It was actually working better in the old flow and there was even a blog post from Github: https://github.blog/changelog/2021-10-14-hiding-whitespace-is-now-remembered-for-each-pull-request/

[pakeeza2425]

The old flow worked better because features like "hide whitespace" were remembered per pull request, as GitHub highlighted in their 2021 blog post
. The new experience seems to have lost some of that convenience, so restoring those capabilities would improve usability.

[mustmodify]

remembering per-user and per-PR seems both obvious and would result in a significantly better experience.

[ericgreveson]

Thanks for the feedback.

• We are planning to support seamless switching of "hide whitespace-only changes", but no timeline yet.
• We are also exploring the implications of making this a user-level preference so it would be remembered/applied consistently across all PRs. Do others have thoughts/opinions on this?

Would it be possible to set "Compact line height" as a user preference as well? I like the changes overall but much prefer the original setting.

"Hide whitespace-only changes" as a user-pref sounds good.
Regarding line spacing, currently, compact mode is an option but the default is to be "extra line height". I feel like "Compact line height" should be the default (to match the current experience, but also because the greater code density from compact mode is in my opinion likely to be more useful to more people when reviewing, compared to the accessibility-focused greater spacing).

[msmygit]

Peer review comments are now very hard to find and finally after an hour of searching around I found the 💬 icon and when I clicked on the reply, it just barfed and took me to the Files Changed view without showing the review comments or their replies.

[rtalexk]

Clicking a line number always assumes you want to add a comment.

In the previous experience it only changes the URL to have deep linking.

[aaccioly]

Any workarounds to obtain permanent urls?

[arisacoba]

@rtalexk which browser are you using? Clicking the line number should just highlight the line, not open the add comment flow.

[rtalexk]

I'm using Arc Browser, but this isn't happening anymore. 👀

[thuringia]

This is so much better, I might go back from reviewing with the VSCode extension now 🚀

I love the new alerts panel, unfortunately it looks like pressing a to hide them doesn't work anymore.

Maybe we could have some grouping or clustering in the alerts panel in the future.
For example I would prefer to see alerts raised by the linter first, instead of "this line is not covered by tests".

[audreyality]

unfortunately it looks like pressing a to hide them doesn't work anymore.

When this feature comes back, it'd be nice if hiding the annotations also stopped them from being added to the clipboard when copying code.

[willsmythe]

Thanks for the feedback. We are planning to restore the ability to use a to hide annotations.

[mccrearyp]

@willsmythe any update on when this is getting added?

[jsync-swirlds]

In addition to using a to hide annotations, can we have a global (user) setting to hide annotations by default?
Having to tap a (which does not always work correctly, particularly for large diffs) for every PR in repos that overuse annotations (a distressingly common practice that makes review a painful chore) is irritating and we're still left with (often) dozens of files that now have no visible change because some irrelevant annotation happened to touch that unchanged file.

[mccrearyp]

Are you not planning on adding this feature back anymore? Did you forget about it? Do you need help? If you need the code here is what I was able to do to add this feature from my browser console:

document.addEventListener('keydown', (e) => {
  if (e.key === 'a' || e.key === 'A') {
    document.querySelectorAll('.InlineMarkers-module__markersWrapper--Fw1hl').forEach(el => {
      el.style.display = el.style.display === 'none' ? '' : 'none';
    });
  }
});

[reecefenwick]

I would love to see the file tree sorted alphabetically with folders on top, then files. It is quite jarring to have changed files in the middle of folders when viewing the file tree currently.

Example of current state

App.tsx
components/
hooks/
index.ts
styles/
utils.ts

Example of desired state

components/
hooks/
styles/
App.tsx
index.ts
utils.ts

This would mirror how the majority of developers view the code in their IDE

[franzliedke]

Indeed, files below would also be consistent with GitHub's own repo tree view.

[warp10]

I see the value in being consistent with the repo’s tree view; nevertheless, having files listed first can have some interesting use cases. For example, if a PR includes a changelog file or a “manifest,” listing files first would make it one of the first (often the very first) files shown, which I think is nice when reviewing code. In my opinion, that would greatly help the review process. Just my two cents.

[parasyte]

I recommend sorting the same way as git diff-tree, which is what I think the old view did.

$ git diff-tree -r ..main
:100644 100644 d68e1befa16c82c562359a15a283a838d72b0727 e24eac8e828629741b34632e9ef2493a9a95d753 M      src/cryptosuite.rs
:000000 100644 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 9ad4b1337b54bf28686cf4becccac13124fe6747 A      src/cryptosuite/bip340_jcs.rs
:000000 100644 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 ab474845d58506540e0ac7e6f0e287770efa1b41 A      src/cryptosuite/bip340_rdfc.rs
:000000 100644 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 92337d2e16e7ec1f1d2ebc0836773c2099538a1d A      src/cryptosuite/transformation.rs
:000000 100644 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 fa9ba63738d7b46f5f4647deb01328f6b6981777 A      src/cryptosuite/utils.rs
:100644 100644 f016785749ea50aeb255c80d1a08c1f53b108f6e cd40229a1055c0bd102c6f47318b0d874ab83610 M      src/document.rs
:100644 100644 8b798f1b9f21f3699cdd399939664e9ef4744a8d e2de154c3a730a5b055d6e944e0b8adb98e26f57 M      src/update.rs
:100644 100644 8c80fd426222a68987e2938d37549005bc9db2a0 9c98405bb3803c789dd49a23ca291f2fd9b774cd M      src/zcap/proof.rs

Old view:

New view:

[richard-rance]

Most tools put the folders first but I wish the standard was files first.

The files in a folder typically describe its contents. For example READMEs, Changelogs, manifests, public functions/interfaces. The sub folders contain the implementation details. I would like to read those first when reviewing a PR (or writing code).

That lets me see if their description makes sense to someone who does not know the internal implementation details. Then I can drill into the sub folders that contain the described implementation to see if they match.

It also helps for languages, like golang, that have a vendor folder containing a copy of all dependencies. It would end up at the end of the PR which is perfect since I basically ignore it when doing a review. Right now I have to scroll past all the vendor files to get to the top level files. That can lead to them being missed.

[sethrh]

This would mirror how the majority of developers view the code in their IDE

[Citation needed.]

I'd prefer the ordering stay the way it was. But developers are an opinionated bunch, so if this is going to change there should be a way to set preferences. Besides, there are also other options besides just alphabetical and alphabetical by folder that might be useful, such as eliminating the tree view altogether and just showing file paths or even just file names.

[Nilomiranda]

I don't see the option to comment on the file itself, only on specific lines.

Some files just get stuck into a loading state, like this one:

The comments tab is really nice, I like being able to filter comments by author, makes it much easier to navigate the reviews and attend to the requested changes or overall feedback.

[Asfand6417]

Ok

[iifeiss780-wq]

App.tsx

components/
hooks/
index.ts
styles/
utils.ts

[ia0-review]

Should there be a separate thread for the "loading state" issue? I'm afraid this might be buried because the "comment on file" issue has been fixed.

[adcoelho]

This is still happening for me when selecting "Files owned by me". They don't load, and I am unable to review. Any known workaround?

[glureau]

Workaround I've just found, go back to old experience, then load again the new experience.

[jieyouxu]

Hi, I would like to play around with this, but I'm not seeing the opt-in mentioned in

You can opt in to the public preview from any pull request via “✨Try the new experience” in the upper-right corner. You can return to the classic view by clicking the “switch back” link.

Am I missing something?

[imanmahjoubi]

We are rolling this out to users slowly, you should be able to see it soon 🎉

[margaret-lin]

The tab for Ask Copilot seems to be missing, also when hovering over lines.

[rr-jimmy-multani]

I'd prefer that this button stay since it's related to the PR and its changes.

[daira]

Feature request: allow people who object to AI (and there are many of us) to turn it off, completely, without the risk of accidentally using it by some misclick or dark pattern.

[3nprob]

Bug: This button is visible even if Copilot is fully disabled in user settings.

[Biglulux]

Asking Copilot to summarize the PR is important to my workflow, so I would like the Ask Copilot button to return to the Files Changed page as well. An alternative could be allowing non-main branch files to be attached to regular Copilot chat, since currently only files on the main branch for all repos can be attached.

[kanonji]

Because my team is understaffed, I often have to review PRs that use languages, frameworks, or libraries I am not very familiar with.
For that reason, I rely heavily on "Ask Copilot about this file-diff" (the line-level Copilot actions).
Even if I can understand the overall design and structure, I do not know the fine-grained syntax or how specific library methods behave.

With the current "Files Changed" view, I can use "Ask Copilot about this file-diff" right away, but in the new view it takes 3 clicks.
If I use it 10 times in a single PR, that is 10 clicks vs. 30 clicks.
If I review 10 PRs, that becomes 100 clicks vs. 300 clicks.

For me, the version where I can use "Ask Copilot about this file-diff" with a single click is clearly better.

[njvrzm]

Not sure if this is the sort of feedback you're after, but the :shipit: emoji does not preview in the review textbox in the new version 😅 . It does show up correctly in the preview.

[willsmythe]

Thanks for the feedback. We'll address.

[cmargonis]

On the topic of emojis, I really liked that I could type e.g. :idea and it would suggest the 💡 emoji. It would be great if this functionality were preserved (or even expanded upon 🙏 )

[KeithYeh]

1. I can't find "comment on this file" button in new UI

Old UI

2. How to hide alerts? I can toggle alerts by pressing "A" in old UI

[willsmythe]

Thanks for the feedback. Both are known issues we're tracking.

[airvision-tw]

Indeed! I am also missing this functionality in the new view.

[cristinadoroftei]

True, I use the "comment on this file" feature quite often and I switched to the old view just because it's missing on the new one 😿

[Smolyan91]

+

[xmfcx]

How to hide alerts? I can toggle alerts by pressing "A" in old UI

This is very important for me.

[julioag-rmd]

On the Files changed tab I can only see 19 files out of 66. Why?

[mdfox20]

Also switched back to the old UI because of this! I almost always open PRs from the email link, so this is a completely breaking bug for me.

[ExtAnimal]

I'm only seeing ONE.

One at a time. I have to open the directory sidebar and click on each file or click the next/prev file buttons.

Whoever did this should be fired.

[bashar-qassis]

to be fair, they are showing an explicit notice, so it seems rather intentional

[tatosjb]

to be fair, they are showing an explicit notice, so it seems rather intentional

In that case they should fire who made this decision

[seriouslysean]

I agree with some of the previous comments. Seeing one file at a time is untenable when doing PR, I really need the option to see them all and scroll through for a seamless experience. There are many cases where a couple files may be related and it's useful to see them and flit between them.

[vengut]

I used to be able to click on a useful link to see the submodule diff in PRs but now its just plain text.
Old:

New:

Could we have that back pls?

[cdunford]

👍 any of the above; missing being able to see what changed; I have to flip back to do the old experience to do it

[Lachy-Antero]

Our release process heavily relies on the ability to click through to see the commit diff of submodules. Will be very sad to see this go.

[hsl0]

I want to see that nice summary of changes for non-GitHub hosted submodules, too.

[jlc6]

I would like to be able to see which commit I’m starting from and which one I’m going to in the changed submodules, as the old interface used to show.

[AminHeidaridahoee]

I also want to see the submodule commitId change in the file preview, it is necessary for our code review

[BE-Code]

It doesn't always seem to remember if hide whitespace was turned on.

[Scramle]

Currently, I think the toggle is just backwards. "Hide whitespace" turned on sets the query param to ?w=1, and turning it of sets it to ?w=0. Expected behaviour should be the other way around. So in @rmartins0's case, that link works as it should, as w=1 shows whitespaces and w=0 hides them.

[shahmir-oscilar]

I believe i was able to reproduce this. See steps at: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/163932#discussioncomment-13915305

[FeBe95]

Related: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/163932#discussioncomment-14012281

[warwick-kiwibank]

A certain order of the URL parameters triggers this bug. This works:
.../files?w=1&file-filters%5B%5D=.yml&file-filters%5B%5D=.tf

But if I put the hide-whitespace parameter after the file-filter parameters, it doesn't work:
.../files?file-filters%5B%5D=.yml&file-filters%5B%5D=.tf&w=1

The parameters are added to the URL in the order of selecting the options in the GUI. So, to avoid the bug, you need to show/hide whitespace, then apply file filters.

The old UI works as expected.

[Bangkah]

Same issue here on Win 11 + Edge 124. Worked after disabling “XYZ” flag. Thanks for the workaround!

[CrazyStevenz]

Our 2991 file PR crashes the page in several different ways, making it impossible to approve the PR with the new PR experience. I had to switch to the classic experience one to approve.

and

[barnysanchezciq]

Not sure I like it, I can't see anywhere the Chat with Copilot option, I had to revert to classic view.

[imanmahjoubi]

@CrazyStevenz can you share the URL for the PR so the team can investigate? Thank you

[MuskanPrismHr]

I miss having the Ask Copilot button in file changes. I could attach my files and give a prompt that could do a good PR review.

[chrisgbaker]

Currently we cannot use the Preview at all if we include a large file; it fully breaks viewing **any file ** when using the new experience (see image).

Additionally, while the old view does work, it used to auto-expand smaller PRs even if a large file was included. Now I need to manually expand each one file by file to review.

[chrisgbaker]

Additonal info: the large file in question is marked in .gitattributes as linguist-generated if this is relevant.

[jvaclavik]

In the new experience I can't find Only files owned by you. It's really important feature for me, hope you will add it.

[gracicot]

One thing I'd like a lot is for comments and "changes since you last review" to still work after a rebase. Even if the commit hashes are different, if the diff they contains are all the same it shouldn't disrupt the review process.

[timmc-edx]

"Jump to comment" is broken for me in the new UI. I click "comments" in the header, then "Jump to comment in diff" on one of the comments, and it only jumps me to the file, not the comment.

This means I have to scroll looking for a tiny little icon, which is infeasible in a large diff. (I like the tiny icons otherwise.)

[imanmahjoubi]

@timmc-edx we just shipped an update on this, please let me know if you are still having issues

[dgoldstein0]

discovered a very nasty problem today - after leaving a lot of comments on a large diff, my teammate tells me that many of my comments aren't associated with a particular line even though I definitely left them inline. Possibly related to the fact that there are a total 61 comments on the PR so we're getting a warning that only 40 will render (not all 61 are mine, I think many are from a linting bot we have - but filtering in the files view to just my comments doesn't help). We've found no way to view the comments that actually says which line they are on.

IMO github reviews main job is to let us comment on code inline and show the author and other reviewers those comments in context, so this failure is a huge trust-breaker.

I tried looking at the PR in the old experience as well and the comments don't show up inline there either.

[willsmythe]

That's not good. Can you provide a link to the PR (it doesn't need to be public) so we can look into the data on our end?

[OlinB]

Rich diff has been broken for me for the past week. I click the "rich diff" button on a file that supports it, and the spinner turns forever without loading:

Looking at the network tab, requests to rich_diff always return a 404:

[willsmythe]

Thanks for reporting. We'll investigate.

[ipeluffo]

Are there any plans to add support for slash commands ? They don't seem to work

Links:

• https://docs.github.com/en/issues/tracking-your-work-with-issues/using-issues/about-slash-commands

[IchordeDionysos]

Please 🥹 I need a shortcut to marks the file currently prominently in view as read/unread 😭

[axelson]

I'm not sure if I'm part of an A/B test or what, but I'm not a fan of this nearly hidden comment view:

It's way too tiny/hidden in my opinion

[joeoak]

Looks like the "Minimize comments" setting is enabled. To show comments inline, you can disable this setting (via the diff view settings menu) or toggle it on/off with the i key.

[danpawlik]

Hi, Is it possible to add extend button on the right side similar to what is on left side?

Thank you in advance.

[Mike-Val]

Give me an option to choose whether clicking on a notification should bring me to the conversation or the files changed tab.

I am not sure if this preview introduced the change, but around the time it was rolled out some notifications started taking me directly to the files changes tab.
There is also no UI indicator in the notifications tab to tell which page a notification would take you to.
A consistent behaviour would be acceptable, but this now feels like a game of roulette.

I rarely use the files changed tab because it's inferior to the VS Code equivalent and I rarely use the VS code conversation tab because it's inferior to the web version.

[goto-dev-null]

I am perpetually astounded how GitHub absolutely fails to have "Jump to Comment" work. In the most popular browser (Chrome) with no extensions installed that could interfere. Or the browser made by Microsoft (Edge). For YEARS. "Classic Experience" was (and is) hit or miss - about 50/50 on whether or not it actually jumped to the comment if the file is marked as "Viewed" or was outdated.

Now in the "New Experience" it's even worse - probably only works 25% of the time, if that. Even if the file is uncollapsed and the comment is uncollapsed it still won't jump to it.

It's baffling. Literally baffling. How can it be this bad when reviewing PRs is like the Number 3 thing that developers do on GitHub. How was this not something that is on the short list of things to fix in the "New Experience"? How did this ever pass QA for either experience? Is the logic that yall just expect us to exclusively use the VS Code extension? If so why not just retire the web interface instead of creating a new worse version?

Good. Gods. Do better.

</rant>

[TallTed]

Isn't it obvious?

We hates it forever, but we're the QA.

It's the only explanation that passes the smell test.

[imanmahjoubi]

@goto-dev-null Could you share more details about where the “jump to comment” behavior isn’t working for you? If possible, a screenshot or short screen recording would really help us understand what’s going wrong.

[jsoref]

"Jump to the comment in the diff" doesn't work if the file is hidden:

• https://github.com/withastro/astro/pull/15601/changes?show-viewed-files=false#r2835125665