About task lists

You can use task lists to break the work for an issue or pull request into smaller tasks, then track the full set of work to completion.

Who can use this feature?

Markdown can be used in the GitHub web interface.

In this article

About task lists

A task list is a set of tasks that each render on a separate line with a clickable checkbox. You can select or deselect the checkboxes to mark the tasks as complete or incomplete.

You can use Markdown to create a task list in any comment on GitHub Enterprise Server.

You can view task list summary information in issue and pull request lists, when the task list is in the initial comment.

Creating task lists

To create a task list, preface list items with a hyphen and space followed by [ ]. To mark a task as complete, use [x].

- [x] #739
- [ ] https://github.com/octo-org/octo-repo/issues/740
- [ ] Add delight to the experience when all tasks are complete :tada:

Screenshot showing the rendered version of the markdown. The references to issues are rendered as issue titles.

Tip

You cannot create task list items within closed issues or issues with linked pull requests.

Reordering tasks

You can reorder the items in a task list. First, click or hover to the left of a task's checkbox until a grid of six dots appears. Then, drag and drop the grid to move the task to a new location.

You can reorder tasks across different lists in the same comment, but you cannot reorder tasks across different comments.