Learning GitHub Copilot

Chapter 2. Coding with Copilot

Now that you have the basic foundations of what Copilot is and how it works, we can move on to the key aspect of how to use it. Since Copilot is intended to function like an AI assistant, you need to understand how to work and communicate with your assistant. The mechanics of this boil down to learning to work with the integrations in the IDE. Learning those mechanics in this chapter and the next will set you up for success with the rest of the book. And they will also answer these questions:

• How do you query the assistant and provide directions for what you need?
• How do you follow up on responses or choose from multiple suggestions?
• Which ways are best to communicate with it for quick suggestions or longer explanations when needed?
• How can you best leverage the AI to help with coding tasks?

IDE = VS Code

GitHub Copilot can be installed and used with multiple IDEs, including VS Code, JetBrains IDEs, Eclipse, and NeoVim. Since we can’t cover all of these in this book, we are using VS Code and GitHub Codespaces as our IDE examples throughout. Please consult your IDE’s documentation for any differences in how to work with Copilot if needed.

Within the IDE, Copilot provides two primary modes of interaction. The first mode is integration within your editor and through the context menus and related controls. For simplicity, I refer to this as inline mode since it is most commonly used directly from the editor or related menus. This is the mode covered ...