Bulk actions
Triage is not a hundred small decisions. It is one decision applied a hundred times. dotby is built for the second shape.
Select
Section titled “Select”| Where | How |
|---|---|
| List | Click a row’s checkbox, then Shift-click to extend a range. |
| Board | ⌘-click or Ctrl-click cards, or use the card checkbox. |
Board multi-select matters more than it sounds. Most trackers make you leave the kanban and switch to a table before you can batch anything, which is exactly when you lose the mental picture you were triaging from.
The bulk bar
Section titled “The bulk bar”Once anything is selected, a bar appears with the count and the actions. Every enabled property is there:
- Status
- Priority
- Assignees
- Labels
- Type
- Sprint
- Module
- Estimate
- Your custom fields
Plus the structural ones: archive, delete, pin, and move to another project.
The shortcut you already know
Section titled “The shortcut you already know”The single-task shortcuts work on a selection too. With several tasks selected, point at any one of them and press:
S status · A assignee · P priority · L labels · T type · E estimate · C sprint · M module
Same key, same popover, applied to everything selected. You do not learn a second set of shortcuts for bulk mode, and you do not have to move the cursor up to a toolbar.
A useful pattern
Section titled “A useful pattern”The three steps that make triage fast:
- Filter to the mess — no assignee, created this week, status Backlog.
- Select all in the filtered view.
- Apply the change that is true for all of them, then narrow and repeat.
Filtering first is what makes step 2 safe: a bulk edit only ever touches what the current filter is showing.
Bulk moves keep the numbers
Section titled “Bulk moves keep the numbers”Moving tasks to another project does not renumber them. WEB-42 stays
WEB-42 forever, even after it moves to the API project. The number is a
permanent identity, not a location — people have already pasted it into commits
and chat.
Undoing a bulk mistake
Section titled “Undoing a bulk mistake”Bulk archive is reversible: archived tasks collect in one place per project and come back to their original column in one click.
Bulk delete puts things in the Trash, where they wait before being removed for good. See Workspace settings.
If you have just applied the wrong status to forty tasks, the fastest fix is usually the same tool: they are still selected, so change it again.
- Filters and search — step one of the pattern above.
- Task properties — what you are setting.
- Statuses and workflow — bulk-moving between columns.