Tracks: matched issues waiting for your review

A Track is an issue one of your Streams matched. It is not work yet. It waits in the Tracks column until you approve it into a lane or decline it, and until then nothing it says reaches an agent. Tracks live in the project’s .fermata folder, apart from drafts and pieces, so the Loop cannot pick one up and run it.

How they arrive

Fermata checks every enabled Stream about once a minute while it is open. Each check compares what the Stream matches now with what it matched last time. An issue that started matching becomes a Track. An issue that stopped matching, on every Stream that had it, takes its Track away again.

• The interval is yours. Settings → Streams, with “All projects” picked in the scope switcher, has Check for new issues every under “Checking for issues”: “1 min”, “5 min”, “15 min”, or “30 min”, captioned “Longer waits save tracker rate limits and battery”. A change applies to the next check, including Streams already waiting.
• Launch and wake catch up. When Fermata starts, and when your Mac wakes, every Stream is checked at once rather than at its next turn, so issues that matched in the meantime arrive right away.
• Check now is the circular arrow in the Tracks column’s header. It checks every Stream in that project immediately.
• Nothing arrives while Fermata is closed. There is no server checking on your behalf; the checks run in the app. Issues that matched while it was closed arrive at the catch-up when you open it.
• Rate limits are respected. Streams are checked one at a time, and a Stream the tracker rate-limited waits until the time the tracker named.

A Stream’s first check only takes a baseline, unless you chose to bring the current matches in when you added it. An issue you already approved or declined in this project never comes back as a new Track, and neither does one that is already a draft or a piece.

When a view is being edited

A Stream that follows a Linear view holds its check while someone is editing the view, so a half-finished filter does not flood the column. The column shows “Waiting for the view to settle”, and the new matches arrive once the view stays the same for a check.

The Tracks column

The column sits to the left of Backlog on the Loop board, in every project that has at least one Stream. With nothing waiting it folds into a narrow strip labelled “Tracks” with its count and health dot. The hub bar above the board counts them (“3 tracks to review”) and carries a chip with the number of Streams and their health. The header carries “Tracks”, a health dot, the count, Check now, and a sliders button that opens the project’s Streams in Settings.

A Track card

Each card shows the issue key, its age (“now”, “4m”, “1h”), the title, and who opened it, with a badge for how the tracker knows that person: “Owner”, “Member”, “Collaborator”, “Contributor”, “First-time”, “Outside”, “Guest”, or “App”. “First-time”, “Outside”, and “Guest” are tinted to draw your eye: they are the authors whose text deserves a second read. An issue with open blockers wears “Blocked by N”. The card never shows the issue’s description or comments. Its border is dashed because it is not accepted work. Click it to review it in the inspector; see review and approve.

Stacks

When one check brings in more than three Tracks at once, they fold into a single card, “5 tracks from Linear”, with the rule and the time under it: “Label fermata · arrived together 3m ago”. Review one by one opens the stack in place, and Fold back into one card closes it. Inside a stack, a sub-issue whose parent arrived in the same batch sits indented under that parent. Each one is still its own Track, approved or declined on its own. Issues you chose to bring in when you added the Stream skip the stack; you already saw them in the preview.

Health

The dot in the column header, on the Streams chip, and beside each Stream in Settings tells you whether checks are working. When a Stream starts failing, a red banner tops the column: “Linear stopped answering”, then the reason and “Nothing new arrives until it’s fixed.”, with Open Streams to go fix it. The column stays full width while a Stream is failing, even with no Tracks, because the banner is the only place the failure is explained.

Notifications

Settings → Notifications has New tracks, “Issues a Stream brings in for review”, on by default. Arrivals are grouped per project: within ten minutes of the first, further arrivals update the same notification (“7 new tracks from Linear”) instead of stacking a new one each minute, and only the first plays a sound. Issues you brought in yourself when adding a Stream do not notify. A Stream that starts failing notifies once (“Linear stopped answering.” and the reason), not again on every check while it stays broken. That one follows the Failures switch. Next: review and approve.