docsreviewreview-draftsopen with CtrlG from a review

Review drafts

Your drafts survive. Review mode saves every comment to disk as you write it, and nothing reaches the forge until you submit.

Outside review mode, a comment posts to the forge as soon as you save it. In review mode, general comments, inline comments, suggestions and replies go into a local draft instead. When you are done, you pick a verdict and submit the whole draft as one review.

Start a review

Open a review from the inbox and press CtrlG. tongs creates a draft bound to the revision you are looking at and says “Review mode started. Comments are now saved locally.”

A status bar stays on screen while the draft is active:

REVIEW DRAFT | 2 comments | v3 | editable | Ctrl+G review

It shows the comment count, the draft version and its state. It adds old revision, version conflict or saving when they apply.

Add comments

Use the same keys as always. With a draft active, each one saves to the draft:

Key	Where	Saves
`c`	Overview or diff	A general comment, or an inline comment on the selected line
`ShiftJ` / `ShiftK`, then `c`	Diff	An inline comment on a range of lines
`F3`	Diff	A suggestion on new-side lines
`r`	Diff or Discussion tab	A reply to an existing thread

Press CtrlS in the comment editor to save. The notification reads “Draft saved locally.” Inline draft comments show in the diff under their line as DRAFT new: ... or DRAFT old: ..., in both unified and split view.

Resolving a thread with ShiftR is not part of the draft. It still acts on the forge right away.

Your drafts survive

Every save is a transaction in a local SQLite database, so a draft outlives a crash, a closed terminal or a reboot. Open the same review again and tongs loads the draft for you.

A review can hold more than one draft, for example one per revision. Press Alt] to cycle through them.

Submit the review

Press CtrlG again to open the review draft screen.

The review draft screen: version 3, editable and ready, two inline draft comments on pipelines/backfill.py lines 12 and 13, the second with a suggestion block, the verdict set to approve, and an empty summary box. — demo data, cropped on small screens

The screen lists every draft comment, the verdict and a summary box. From here:

Key	Action
`v`	Cycle the verdict
`CtrlS`	Submit the review
`e`	Edit the selected comment
`x`	Remove the selected comment (press twice)
`ShiftD`	Discard the whole draft (press twice)
`Esc`	Close (press twice to drop unsaved summary or verdict changes)

The verdicts are Comment and Approve on both forges. GitHub adds Request changes, which needs a summary. Pressing ShiftA while a draft is active opens this screen instead of approving on its own.

On GitHub, a draft whose comments are all inline goes up as a single pull request review, with its summary and verdict. Otherwise tongs sends each comment in order, then the summary and the verdict. When the last step lands, tongs says “Review submitted.” and removes the draft.

When a submission is interrupted

tongs records each step before it sends it, so an interrupted submission can pick up where it stopped. It never repeats a write it cannot confirm.

Paused. A step failed with a clear answer from the forge. Press r to resume the remaining steps.
Unknown. tongs cannot tell whether a step reached the forge. Check the review on the forge, then choose one:

Key	Action
`1`	Retry the remaining steps. This may post a duplicate.
`2`	Return the remaining comments to local editing
`3`	Mark the remaining comments as submitted

Each choice needs a second press.

When the review changes

A draft belongs to the revision you started it on. When new commits arrive, the bar shows old revision. You can still read that draft, but you cannot submit it or add inline comments or replies to it.

Open the draft screen and press ShiftN to start a draft for the current revision. General comments and replies to threads that still exist carry over. Inline comments stay in the old draft, so you can read them and add them again on the new diff.

If the same draft changes somewhere else, such as in a second terminal or the desktop app, tongs refuses the save and keeps your text. The bar shows version conflict, and the draft screen shows the recovered summary and verdict so you can try again.

Every key on this page is also listed in the keybindings reference.