GitHub Copilot Across Environments: IDE, Chat, GitHub.com, and Command Line Techniques

Intermediate
Developer
DevOps Engineer
Student
GitHub

Explore the multifaceted capabilities of GitHub Copilot across various development environments. Learn to harness AI-assisted coding in your IDE, engage in natural language conversations for complex tasks, enhance your command-line productivity, and accelerate your development workflow from code creation to pull request completion.

Learning objectives

At the end of this module, you are able to:

  • Understand how to utilize GitHub Copilot's auto-suggestions, multiple suggestions pane, and its ability to adapt to different coding styles to accelerate code development.
  • Understand how to provide context to GitHub Copilot through inline comments, block comments, doc strings, and other types of comments to enhance code generation accuracy and speed.
  • Understand how to interact with GitHub Copilot through natural language conversations to generate complex code, debug issues, obtain code explanations, and streamline development workflows in real-time.
  • Understand how to improve the relevance of GitHub Copilot Chat's suggestions by using scope referencing, slash commands, and agents to quickly complete routine development tasks.
  • Understand how to use GitHub Copilot on GitHub.com for repository exploration, pull request assistance, issue management, and collaborative code review workflows.
  • Understand how to interact with GitHub Copilot in CLI to get command explanations, suggestions, and execute commands to automate terminal workflows.

Prerequisites

  • Basic coding knowledge.
  • GitHub Copilot Access: To use it, you can install the GitHub Copilot extension available to you in the following Integrated Development Environments (IDEs):
  • Visual Studio
  • Visual Studio Code
  • Neovim
  • JetBrains IDEs (IntelliJ, PyCharm, WebStorm, etc.)
  • A GitHub account, which you would connect to Copilot from your code editor.