Manual sorting for 'Parent issue' swimlanes in Board view

[hi-matsuo]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Product Feedback

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Projects

Body

In Board view, I want to manually reorder the parent issue swimlanes.

I am using GitHub Projects and have set the swimlanes to 'Parent issue' to manage subtasks. Currently, the swimlanes are automatically sorted alphabetically by the parent issue titles. I would like to control the order of these swimlanes.

My goal is to arrange parent issues by priority and view their subtasks accordingly. I hope this feature can be implemented.
(If there are any workarounds or existing methods to achieve this, please let me know.)

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[naqvi110k]

+1 on this request. I've run into the exact same limitation.

Current behavior: Swimlanes are sorted alphabetically by parent issue title when you set swimlanes to "Parent issue". No other sort options exist.

Why this matters for real workflows: Alphabetical order is useless for prioritization. I want to see:

• High priority parent issues at the top
• Then medium priority
• Then low/backlog
• Maybe even drag-drop custom ordering

Workarounds I've tried (none are great):

1. Prefix titles with numbers – 01 - Critical bug, 02 - Feature request, etc. This forces alphabetical to match your priority order. But it's ugly and breaks if you rename things later.

2. Use a custom field for priority, then group by that field instead of parent issue – You lose the subtask nesting view, though. You can't see child issues under their parent if you group by priority.

3. Use a separate "Priority" column and sort by that column – Only works in Table view, not Board view. And you still lose the parent-child relationship.

What I'd love to see GitHub add:

• Drag handles on the swimlane headers in Board view
• Ability to sort by a custom field (Priority, Due date, etc.) within the Parent issue grouping
• A "Manual order" toggle that remembers your drag-drop arrangement

Quick question for the OP: How many parent issues are you typically managing in one project? For me it's usually 10-20 active parents, so manual drag-drop would be perfect. If you're dealing with 50+, you'd probably want a sort-by-priority-field option instead.

Upvoted. Hope the Projects team picks this up.