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Github Copilot Edits

I continue my journey on getting the most out of Github Copilot. Today I want to take a look at Copilot Edits as another way to use AI in your day-to-day coding experience. Until recently, you either had to use completions or the chat experience. 

With Copilot Edits, a third option is added to the list.

Why Copilot Edits?

Where the completions or the chat experience are a great fit for single file changes, they can be cumbersome for bigger changes that span multiple files. When using Copilot Edits, you can specify a set of files that should edited and then ask Copilot to do some changes. 

Remark: At the moment of writing Copilot Edits seems only to be available inside VS Code and not (yet) in Visual Studio.

Let’s give it a try…

  • Click on the Github Copilot icon at the top and choose Open Copilot Edits from the dropdown(or just hit CTRL-Shift-I)


  • This will open up the Copilot Edits view where we can start a new editing session.

 

  • First we need to add a set of files to our Working Set. Therefore click on + Add Files and choose the files that should be part of the working set. Copilot will only apply changes to these files.
    • Remark: At the moment the working set is limited to 10 files.

 

  • Now we can enter a chat prompt telling the change that we want taking our working set into account.

 

  • We now have the option to go through all the changes and either Accept or Discard them.

 

  • The edits are not saved to disk automatically. You can save the files by clicking on the Save icon.
    • Remark: This doesn’t mean that the changes are accepted automatically.

 

  • If you are happy with the final set of changes you can click Accept.
  • Click on Done to end the editing session.

This first experience of this new feature was certainly positive. Would be nice if I could define the working set by just specifying it as text(e.g. Edit all razor files...).

Update:  
  • I was able to mimic the behavior I mentioned above by first entering my request in the Copilot Chat experience:


  • And then I hit the Edit with Copilot button:
  • Copilot automatically added all impacted files to the working set and when I click on Rerun in the Chat window it starts to apply the change. Nice!

More information

Copilot Edits

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