Awesome Copilot Palette

A VS Code extension and CLI for browsing, managing, and installing curated GitHub Copilot instructions, prompts, and agent modes into your projects.

Overview

Awesome Copilot Palette provides a catalog of reusable Copilot customization files — instruction files (.instructions.md), prompt files (.prompt.md), and agent modes (.agent.md) — that can be installed into any workspace. It ships with a curated set of bundled assets and can fetch additional files from remote GitHub repositories (e.g., github/awesome-copilot).

Installation

Quick Install from GitHub Releases

1. Go to the Releases page
2. Download the latest awesome-palette-vscode-*.vsix file
3. Open VS Code → Extensions view (Ctrl+Shift+X / Cmd+Shift+X)
4. Click "..." menu → "Install from VSIX..." → Select downloaded file
5. Reload VS Code

For detailed installation instructions, troubleshooting, and alternative methods, see INSTALL.md.

Features

• Catalog Browser — Browse all available instructions, prompts, and agents from a sidebar panel or full catalog view
• One-Click Install — Install individual files or batch-install multiple files into your workspace's .github/ directory
• Remote Repositories — Fetch additional customization files from configurable GitHub repositories
• Smart Caching — Layered caching (local, online, enhanced) with configurable TTLs to minimize API requests
• Installation Status — See which catalog files are already installed in your current workspace
• Conflict Resolution — Handle file conflicts during installation (overwrite, skip, or rename)

Screenshots

Sidebar View

The sidebar provides quick access to catalog statistics, installation status, and workspace connection information:

Full Catalog Browser

The full catalog view displays all available instructions, prompts, agents, skills, and cookbooks in a searchable table:

Project Structure

This is a monorepo with three packages:

packages/
├── core/       # Platform-agnostic library: catalog, repository, installer
├── vscode/     # VS Code extension: sidebar, webview, commands
└── cli/        # Command-line interface (planned)

@awesome-palette/core

The core library containing all business logic with no VS Code dependencies:

• CatalogManager — Manages the catalog of available files (local + remote), with caching
• RepositoryManager — Fetches and indexes files from GitHub repositories via the API
• FileInstaller — Handles installing catalog files into a target workspace directory

awesome-palette-vscode

The VS Code extension providing the UI:

• SidebarProvider — Lightweight sidebar view with catalog summary statistics
• CatalogWebviewProvider — Full catalog browser with search, filtering, and installation
• Two commands: Open Copilot Catalog and Refresh Catalog

awesome-palette-cli

Command-line interface for using the catalog outside of VS Code. (Planned)

Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Node.js >= 18.0.0
• VS Code >= 1.85.0 (for the extension)

Build

# Install dependencies
npm install

# Build all packages
npm run build

# Build individual packages
npm run build:core
npm run build:vscode

Development

# Type-check all packages
npm run check-types

# Watch mode for the VS Code extension
cd packages/vscode && npm run watch

To test the extension, open the monorepo in VS Code and press F5 to launch an Extension Development Host.

Configuration

The extension exposes the following settings under awesome-palette.*:

Setting	Default	Description
remoteRepositories	[{owner: "github", repo: "awesome-copilot", branch: "main", enabled: true}]	GitHub repositories to fetch files from
enableOnlineFetching	true	Enable/disable fetching from remote repositories
githubToken	""	GitHub PAT for higher API rate limits (optional)
cache.enabled	true	Enable catalog caching
cache.onlineTtlMs	10800000 (3h)	Online catalog cache TTL
cache.enhancedTtlMs	1800000 (30m)	Enhanced catalog cache TTL

Bundled Assets

The extension ships with a curated set of files covering:

• Language-specific instructions — Python, C++, Go
• Domain instructions — Algorithms, Kubernetes, Performance, Testing, Design, Documentation
• Process instructions — Code generation, Code comments, Code review, Planning, Research, Tasking, Changelog, Prototyping, Sequence diagrams, UML
• Agents — Code Development Assistant, Expert Technical Explainer, Deep Planning Specialist
• Prompts — Code review, System design, Project planning, Test planning, Unit tests (Python/C++), Commit messages, Task breakdown, Prototyping

License

HPE Internal Use Only.