this is on our roadmap! but we hadn't opened an issue for it yet, so thank you~

we wanted to do some designs up front and see what made the most sense; we only have some hand-drawn prototypes so far.

personally i was interested in something kind of like git add -p where you could page through comments/suggestions and take an action on each one. i'm curious what people think about that level of interactivity.

We've experimented with various flavors of this. For awhile we used git appraise, which has a CLI along the lines described by OP. We found it basically unusable, to the point where it was having a chilling effect on code review.

I prototyped a frontend which allowed you mark up a diff to leave comments, and that seemed fairly promising. The workflow ends up being similar to a the format-patch + email review workflow, except you do it all locally. The syntax I arrived on was using '>' as a prefix character for new comments, and something else (don't remember) for putting existing comments inside the patch, in context.

The only real issue I had was that emacs tries to be helpful with edited patch files to the point of breaking them when you try to add comment metadata. A derived mode to disable this feature fixed it.

Ultimately we chose to go back to github PR's rather than try to tool our way around it. The reason we were using it in the first place is because it gave us a way to digitally sign review comments; this would be a very attractive feature of any CLI-driven review workflow.

(also: Hi Nate! Thanks for making something great!)

Interactivity is nice but not needed for MVP. JetBrains etc can provide the interactivity using the cli hooks I'd suspect. Interactivity is a good v2 feature though I think

I prototyped a frontend which allowed you mark up a diff to leave comments, and that seemed fairly promising. The workflow ends up being similar to a the format-patch + email review workflow, except you do it all locally. The syntax I arrived on was using '>' as a prefix character for new comments, and something else (don't remember) for putting existing comments inside the patch, in context.

What about the reverse? Quote the entire patch file, and have people insert their comments without the quote marks. That will be familiar for anyone used to reviewing patches by email, and the > prefix on every line should prevent editors from attempting to fiddle with the patch.

I've renamed this as we have since added gh pr review (pending release) for adding a top level approve, request changes, or comment review on a given pr.

However, we did not include an affordance for line comments.

Hey @vilmibm, stumbled across this issue after realizing that gh is getting improvements - awesome!

I just wanted to point out a project I made a while back called re that has a workflow for line by line review comments:

https://github.com/jordanlewis/re

I find it at least medium usable. It has a workflow that's half add -p inspired, but mostly uses a modified diff format that allows you to leave inline comments, right from an ordinary git diff that's available in a buffer.

Please feel free to take ideas from that project if you find it appealing!