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At Linear, a long‑standing UI papercut caused menu items to overflow their outer…

2026-08-04 · 22:18 UTC ·@michael_chomsky ·0 min read

Brief

Emil Kowalski describes a long-standing Linear UI bug where menu items overflow their outer container; after finding that overflow: hidden would break complex animations, he had an epiphany to use a CSS mask to fade items out. He shared a before-and-after video (focused on the left edge) showing the visual fix, posted 2026-08-04.

Why it matters

At Linear, a long‑standing UI papercut caused menu items to overflow their outer container; Emil Kowalski demonstrated the issue (before-and-after video) and highlighted the left-edge overflow (post dated 2026-08-04).

Key details

  • Emil ruled out a simple overflow: hidden because it would break the animations, and instead applied a simple CSS mask to fade the items out, preserving animation while fixing the visual overflow.
Source evidence

Guys help, explain Emil going to Linear in sports terms

Emil Kowalski (@emilkowalski)

We had this long-standing papercut at Linear where the menu items overflow their outer container.

It was hard to fix, or so I thought, because the structure is pretty complicated given all the design details, so a simple overflow: hidden wouldn’t work as it would break the animation.

But today I had an epiphany that we could just use a simple CSS mask and fade the items out.

Here’s a before & after with a zoom on the problem, look at the left edge:

Video

— https://nitter.net/emilkowalski/status/2084610106138726659#m