2.6.0 - 2026-09-02

Release Notes

Added

• team members --json and user list --json now include each member's canonical Linear url, so callers can create real Markdown mentions without guessing profile slugs
• issue pr accepts --template/-T <file> to start the pull request body from a template file, with a pr_template config option (LINEAR_PR_TEMPLATE) as a per-project default and --no-template to skip that default for one invocation. The Linear issue URL is appended after the template, so the pull request stays linked to its issue (#266; thanks @maparent)
• issue comment list --json now exposes stable author identity: user.id, externalUser.id, and a botActor object (id, name, type, subType) for comments posted by integrations. Display names are editable and can collide across a workspace — an external user's display name can even match a real member's — so programs consuming the JSON previously had nothing reliable to attribute a comment with (#268; thanks @leonardsellem)
• issue comment list --json now includes editedAt, which is set only when a comment's author revised it. updatedAt also moves for unrelated backend churn, so it could not answer "has this been changed since it was written?" (#268; thanks @leonardsellem)
• LINEAR_IGNORE_ENV_FILE=1 skips .env loading entirely, for repositories whose .env is not dotenv-shaped

Changed

• CLI help now explains how to create real Linear Markdown mentions and collapsible sections, so an agent driving the CLI without the bundled skill still gets it right. The ten commands that take a Markdown body carry the rule inline (@name mentions nobody; a plain Linear URL does) and point at a new linear markdown reference, and team members --json / user list --json say what the url field is for
• issue mine, issue query, issue start, and team states now group statuses in the same order as the Linear app: by workflow state type, then by the team's configured position within that type. Issue listings previously ran the order backwards (canceled and done first), and every status list sorted on raw position alone, which stranded a late-positioned status such as an "In Review" at position 1002 after "Duplicate" instead of beside "In Progress"
• when --limit truncates an issue listing, the retained issues are now the most actionable rather than the most recently closed. The Linear API cannot sort by a team's configured positions, so it still selects which issues are fetched; that selection changed from closed-first to open-first. A status this build does not recognize sorts after all known ones
• an unquoted $VAR reference in a LINEAR_/GH_/GITHUB_ value is now skipped with a warning rather than expanded. Expansion of an unset variable silently produced the string "undefined", and a self-referential one hung. Quoted values are unaffected, since dotenv never expanded those
• issue query no longer prints the "using default team" note when the team comes from the project's own linear.toml or .env. The note exists to flag ambient defaults — a global config file or an exported LINEAR_TEAM_ID — silently narrowing a query; explicit, directory-scoped project configuration is not ambient, so the reminder was just noise on every query

Fixed

• linear no longer crashes on startup when .env is a directory rather than a file, and no longer hangs forever on a .env written to be sourced by a shell (a self-referential value such as export PATH=$PATH:/opt/bin spun the dotenv expander's loop indefinitely). An unusable .env is now reported as a warning on stderr and skipped, and the repository-root .env is still consulted as a fallback (#265; thanks @jackarch-2 for the fix and the report in #264)
• issue comment list showed @Unknown for every comment posted by an integration or bot, because the query never asked for botActor; those comments now render the bot's name (falling back to its type)
• issue comment add --id now rejects a value that is not a v4 UUID (the format Linear documents for the field) with an actionable error, instead of forwarding it and surfacing a raw API error

Install linear 2.6.0

Install prebuilt binaries via shell script

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -LsSf https://github.com/schpet/linear-cli/releases/download/v2.6.0/linear-installer.sh | sh

Install prebuilt binaries via Homebrew

brew install schpet/tap/linear

Install prebuilt binaries into your npm project

npm install @schpet/linear-cli@2.6.0

Download linear 2.6.0

File	Platform	Checksum
linear-aarch64-apple-darwin.tar.xz	Apple Silicon macOS	checksum
linear-x86_64-apple-darwin.tar.xz	Intel macOS	checksum
linear-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.zip	x64 Windows	checksum
linear-aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.xz	ARM64 Linux	checksum
linear-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.xz	x64 Linux	checksum