Version 2022.1 of JetBrains’ project management tool YouTrack has just been released, and features (as well as a little something for the LaTeX lovers) a visual approach to project planning.

The latter comes in the form of (still early stages) interactive Gantt charts, which are a sort of bar chart for visualising project schedules that plot tasks against a timeline, and allow taking task dependencies into account. In YouTrack, the new addition is hoped to help teams plan projects and see them through by offering a way of scheduling tasks and providing an easy to grasp representation of the state of things as well as more accurate estimates.

To get started with Gantt charts, teams have to add the issues that make up a project to a tree view where they can be grouped into logical units, and schedule the tasks by dragging them into the timeline provided. Once dependencies have been added, users are able to recalculate the planned start and end dates of individual tasks whenever estimates have been adjusted through the click of a button.

In order to make sure issues don’t get lost in the shuffle because they depend on others that haven’t been assigned yet, the update also comes with the option to find issues based on the attributes (such as being unassigned) of linked issues.

Adding charts seems to be a (minor) theme of the release, seeing that they also made their way into the workflow creation process. Users not completely comfortable with writing workflow rules in JavaScript can now configure which states an issue has to pass through in what order via flowchart-style state machines in the Workflow Constructor. The update also integrates support for diagrams.net, so that teams have a graphic way of sharing and collaborating on new features.

Meanwhile those happy with just writing code will be thrilled to learn that YouTrack 2022.1 finally allows using LaTeX in markdown. Demand for a way to add maths formulas to knowledge base articles, issues, and comments without using images has been around for a good nine years already, so it’s worth noting it has become an option through the LaTeX support.

Other new features include the option to work with the version control system changes linked to an issue, use the import commits action with the Gitea VCS integration, and access information about a user’s profile language from workflows.

The YouTrack team also fixed some usability issues, so that, for example, starred saved searches appear at the top of the list, reports include dates, inserting a user mention won’t remove the following word anymore, and authorisations are refreshed when a laptop is opened after a prolonged sleep period. 
A complete list of changes is available via the project’s release notes.