Sorry, this is by design! We wanted to reflect the web UI as much as possible, and there "closed" also includes "merged": https://github.com/cli/cli/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed

How could we make this clearer? I'm guessing you really need a true closed filter?

Thanks for the quick response. :TIL: closed includes merged. Makes sense.

TL;DR: adding /branches support to gh would be 🥇

What I'm really looking for, is exposing the data web UI does at /branches, in gh. Specifically, /branches/stale.

I'd like to clean up my branches - getting rid of ones that were associated with PRs that were closed or merged, and ones that are very old. The "associated with merged PRs" was easy with the new gh pr list --state closed (thanks for that BTW).

I know some of this can be done with just git but its semi-complex (especially with PR squash merges), which makes me anxious/nervous... There are OSS tools [1] but would rather use a tool maintained/vetted/battle-tested by GH.

@rynop I see! Thanks; that's valuable insight.

For now you can request the PR list manually via the API:

gh api -XGET repos/:owner/:repo/pulls -f state=closed -f per_page=100 | \
  jq -r '.[] | [.number,.title,.state,.head.label] | @tsv'

This will return true closed PRs, no merged.

@rynop I see! Thanks; that's valuable insight.

For now you can request the PR list manually via the API:

gh api -XGET repos/:owner/:repo/pulls -f state=closed -f per_page=100 | \
  jq -r '.[] | [.number,.title,.state,.head.label] | @tsv'

This will return true closed PRs, no merged.

Actually I don't think it returns true closed PRs. One of the results is
6601 Fix a few typos closed Galunid:patch
koreader/koreader#6601
It seems it returns merged PR as closed too