[FEAT]: support GitHub Copilot Chat

[SIMULATAN]

Describe the need

In order to streamline the development process for people living in the command line, it would be awesome to have GitHub Copilot Chat in the CLI extension. This way, you can for ex. ask it for help regarding a file in the current directory.

My current use case is to get help with a Kustomize patch, which I'm editing in vim.

Note

I am aware that GitHub Copilot Chat is still in its early stages. I'm merely opening this issue to voice the demand and, potentially, spark a discussion regarding this, also considering the backing interface.

[rlove]

I like this idea, to add a use case in support of this.

I have lower range of vision. I have found PowerShell and Bash to very helpful, as it's an interface that I know and can always depend on, instead of searching for things found in a menu and results in fonts that are not as always as clear of what I can setup with a basic terminal window.

[andyfeller]

@SIMULATAN @rlove : thank you for opening this issue, sharing this idea and your experiences! ❤

This touches on an avenue I find interesting when this effort was originally starting and looking at other tools in the space. In the case of Vim — which is my favorite editor too — there have been similar asks to bring IDE chat support to the Neovim plugin. I'm unsure of the funding behind that though there is a 3rd party Neovim plugin that attempts to support it: https://github.com/CopilotC-Nvim/CopilotChat.nvim

[mxie]

Thanks for your feedback and use cases @SIMULATAN and @rlove!

Just so I understand correctly, this idea is about bringing chat to the command line and not text editors like vim, right?

[SIMULATAN]

Thanks for your feedback and use cases @SIMULATAN and @rlove!

Just so I understand correctly, this idea is about bringing chat to the command line and not text editors like vim, right?

Yes! My (personal) idea would be to add it as a subcommand to the existing gh copilot command. I think it would fit well there.

The main reason why I didn't try to implement this myself yet is because I couldn't find any documentation on a GitHub Copilot API. Hence, I believe the vim integration efforts could serve as a reference implementation.

[mxie]

Got it - thanks for the clarification! Supporting chat is something we definitely considered but decided to punt on until we get feedback from folks like yourself. 😄 I'll bring this back to the team to discuss!

The main reason why I didn't try to implement this myself yet is because I couldn't find any documentation on a GitHub Copilot API.

That's because it's not publicly available. :)

[GerbenRampaart]

Thanks for submitting this! I would love for chat to be supported by github cli.

My use case is for automating purposes. We (large enterprise) have resources, like documentation and source repositories (bitbucket) running on-prem.

It would be really nice if I could consume these resources, write them locally for the length of a chat command, and include them using #file:<some_file>, for example to generate changelogs for PRs.

Just as a suggestion: you could introduce the env variable GH_WORKSPACE, that resolves, if set, to a directory when you include the @workspace in

gh copilot chat @workspace please summarize file #file:some_file.txt

[GerbenRampaart]

@mxie could you shed some light on the priority the chat feature has for you (if any).

Thank you

[jvkaam]

@mxie I could indeed see a lot of opportunities to automate.