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Discovering Visual Studio 2026 – Copilot Actions

Yes! The new Visual Studio 2026 edition is available in preview (now called Insiders). I'll take some time this week to walk through some of the features I like and maybe some of the rough edges I discover along the way.

Until recently you had 2 kinds of interactions with GitHub Copilot; either it was automatically with features like AI autocompletion in your editor, next edit suggestions or the intelligent copy paste feature I talked about yesterday; or it was manually by using prompts through one of the available chat modes.

With the introduction of Copilot Actions, a third interaction mode is introduced.

Copilot Actions

Copilot Actions give you direct access to Copilot from the context menu inside the editor without the need to type any prompt.

Right now, the list of available actions is limited to the following 5:

  • Explain
  • Optimize selection
  • Generate comments
  • Generate tests
  • Add to Chat

Remark: The Optimize option is only available when you have some code selected

I’m not quite sure if I will use this feature a lot. 2 possible improvements that I think would certainly help

  • Give us the option to assign a keyboard shortcut to these actions (maybe it is already possible, but I don’t know why)
  • Make these Actions context aware like we now have with the Quick Actions and Refactorings… optio,
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