Inbox overview

The Inbox collects every “needs you” signal into one list: issues assigned to you across your connected providers, pull requests waiting for your review, activity and CI failures on your own PRs, and agents that are waiting for input or finished a turn. Triage it entirely from the keyboard, or click through to act.

What lands in the Inbox

Row kind	Fed by	Notes
Assigned task	GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps, Jira, Linear, YouTrack	Issues and work items assigned to you; sub-tasks nest under their parent
Review requested	GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps	A PR where your review was requested
Activity on your PR	GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps	Approvals, change requests, reviews, and comments, aggregated per PR — “alice”, or “alice +2” when several people were involved
CI failed	GitHub, GitLab, Azure DevOps	Red checks on your PR — “CI failed: build”, or “CI failed: build +2” when several checks are red
Agent waiting / finished	Your agent workspaces	Pushed live by the birch-status plugin

Jira, Linear, and YouTrack are issue-only sources — they feed task rows and nothing else. See Integrations for connecting accounts.

Provider rows refresh on a background sync of roughly every 10 minutes per feed; the Refresh button in the Inbox header triggers a sync immediately. Agent rows don’t wait for a sync — they arrive the moment the agent reports an event. New items can also raise a desktop notification, a sound, and an app-icon badge — see Notifications.

Tabs and nesting

The segmented control above the list cross-cuts the feed, each tab showing its count: All · Agents · PRs · Tasks. A second switch flips between the Inbox and the Archive.

Task rows nest: a sub-task indents under its parent, and a parent that is not assigned to you appears as a dimmed scaffolding row purely so your own tasks keep their place in the hierarchy (it carries no triage actions). Rows with hidden children show a count and an expand twisty; → / ← expand and collapse from the keyboard.

Keyboard triage

With the list focused:

Key	Action
J / K	Next / previous row
Enter	The row’s primary action (see below)
E	Archive — in the Archive, Restore
S	Snooze for 1 hour
P	Pin / unpin
U	Undo the last archive or snooze
→ / ←	Expand / collapse nested tasks

Enter runs the row’s next-best action: an agent row opens its workspace, a task row starts a workspace when it can, and everything else opens in its provider’s web UI. The full shortcut table lives in Keyboard shortcuts.

Pin, snooze, archive

• Pin marks the row with a ★ in its accent color; Unpin clears it.
• Snooze hides the row until a chosen time, then brings it back.
• Archive moves the row out of the Inbox into the Archive, where open tasks and PRs can be restored. New activity in the tracker brings an archived task back on its own.

Snooze exists in three grades, deliberately different:

Where	Options
Row hover button (clock icon)	One-shot “Snooze until tomorrow, 9:00” — no menu
Keyboard S	Fixed 1 hour
Detail-pane Snooze menu	1 hour · This evening (18:00, or an hour from now if it’s already evening) · Tomorrow (9:00) · Next week (7 days out, 9:00)

Hovering a row swaps its relative-time stamp for the action cluster — Pin, Snooze, and Archive — without shifting the rest of the list.

Archiving a task with subtasks

Archiving a task that has subtasks in the Inbox — from the row, the detail pane, or E — asks first: the Archive ”…”? dialog says how many subtasks it has, and Also archive N subtasks is ticked by default, so E then Enter clears the whole tree. Untick it to archive just the task; Esc archives nothing. A task without subtasks, a PR, or an agent row is archived without asking.

The task and the subtasks archived with it stay a group: Undo on the “Archived with N subtasks” toast, or Restore on the task in the Archive, brings the whole group back — “Restored with N subtasks”. A subtask you archived separately, or one that new tracker activity already brought back, is left alone.

Hiding task types

If Epics, Features, or sub-tasks crowd your Inbox, hide them per tracker account in Settings → Task automation → Inbox: tick the task types to keep out under Hide these types: (or add one by name, e.g. Epic), and — where the tracker has the notion — hide every sub-item with one switch. Hidden tasks still sync; they just don’t show in the Inbox or the Archive, and they raise no notification. Untick a type to bring its tasks straight back. When a parent type is hidden, its children move up to the top level instead of disappearing.

The detail pane

Selecting a row fills the right-hand pane:

• a category badge and a colored state pill, with the relative age on the right;
• the title and a source row (provider tile, source name, and the item’s reference in monospace);
• the description, rendered as markdown. Remote images are stripped — issue bodies are untrusted content, so Birch never fetches an image URL while rendering. Instead, task images that were downloaded and vetted during sync appear as a thumbnail strip below the text; clicking a thumbnail opens the cached local copy in your OS image viewer. Rows whose task has images carry a small attachment marker in the list.

The footer pairs the triage cluster (Pin/Unpin, Snooze, Archive) with the row’s next-best action:

• Open in {Source} — open the item in its provider’s web UI;
• Open workspace — on agent rows, jump to the waiting workspace (AI in Birch);
• Start workspace — on task rows, launch an agent seeded with the issue — see Start a workspace from a task.

With nothing selected the pane reads “Select an item to see details”; an empty list shows “All clear — Nothing needs your attention right now.”