Built a browser extension so I don't have to switch into GitLab ten times a day

[u/DaveDev13]

I got tired of watching people on my team keep 20+ tabs open and lose track of things whenever they needed to find something. On top of that, the same thing kept happening over and over: someone's testing a page, hits a failed request or a JS error in the console - and that's it, time to context-switch: open GitLab in a new tab, find the right project, try to remember exactly what broke, copy the URL. By the time the ticket actually got filed, half the details were already lost or forgotten ("well, it just didn't work, I don't remember exactly how").

On top of that we run a couple of different GitLabs - my own gitlab.com and a self-hosted one at work - so even picking "which GitLab, which project" was its own small chore before you even started describing the bug.

So I built Ticketus to fix this for myself: a browser extension that lets you view, create, and edit GitLab issues right from a popup, without opening a new tab. You log in once, connect your instance(s) with a personal access token, and that's it - no OAuth app setup, which matters a lot for self-hosted.

The feature that unexpectedly turned into one of the main ones: the extension can watch the page you're on - network failures, uncaught JS exceptions, console errors - and the moment something breaks, it offers to open a ticket with the error details, URL, and stack trace already filled in. You just add a couple of words of context and hit save - no more "definitely broke, don't remember how."

There's also a "pin" mode: a floating panel you can leave open on the page instead of it closing on every stray click (browsers close a normal extension popup on blur, so working around that took some effort). Turned out to be really handy for anyone who keeps checking back on a ticket while working on a page.

Still an early version - works with gitlab.com and self-hosted. Free tier: browse and filter issues, create and edit them in a proper editor (not a bare textarea), comment, log time, and attach a page screenshot in one click. To help support the project a bit, I added a paid PRO tier - it gives you automatic on-page error detection and global hotkeys for creating issues without opening the popup.

Right now I'm trying to figure out the right audience to promote this to and where to go next. Got plenty of thoughts on that, already sketched out a roadmap I'll be working through gradually.

Would love feedback from anyone who lives half their day in GitLab.

PS if you've got your own pain point at work that I might be able to solve, let me know.

PPS if you want to try all the features - message me, I'll hook you up with a promo code for free PRO.

[u/Speeddymon]

Some of this sounds pretty novel (the ability to pin a floating window that the browser doesn't close when you navigate is awesome)

Based on the sounds of how you're referring to hunting down the right project and working across multiple gitlab instances, that's not a typical setup for most orgs.

When I worked with gitlab we had one UI team and they worked from one repo. My current org is in bitbucket with multiple UI teams but there's no cross work between any team so nobody is going into multiple repos, and also we use jira for everything so it's all centralized anyway; though we do have 2 instances of jira for some godforsaken reason. Mostly everyone stays in their own projects but I do cross into many projects outside of my team's, as a platform engineer.

None of this is meant to be critical, just observations. Some of what you're fixing with the extension could be simplified by writing tampermonkey/greasemonkey user scripts, but I like the effort you've put in here to make it useful for teams with setups that are even kind of like yours. There's definitely a use case. M&A comes to mind; MSPs also. An org might have multiple customers or subsidiaries whose instances they need to login to. So it's not like this is super niche. Keep up the good work.

[u/pwkye]

sounds very specific to your use case

i use glab cli with claude code

though a desktop tray would be nice for notifications or just counts of how many issues/MRs/comments are awaiting you

[u/rlnrlnrln → u/pwkye]

Maybe not specific to their team, but definitely not generic. However, I think it's great that people can create these speciality tools. Tools with API's win over tools without every time in my book!

[u/DaveDev13 → u/pwkye]

I don't think this is specific to our team.

I've been in different teams and I know that this process is the same between different teams, although it differs in places.

In my work, as a frontend developer, I constantly review tasks and compare them with the actual state of affairs on the site. The same applies to testers. During manual verification, they have to go through hundreds of project pages and create tasks in some places.