Partial suggestion acceptance - Github Copilot

[SmallLemur]

When using Copilot, users would like to be able to only partially accept suggestion instead of the whole suggestion at once.
The users demand either word by word or line by line completion.

Desired behaviour:
Press a predefined key and accept the whole suggestion.
Use a predefined combination of 2 keys to accept the top line of the suggestion. (eg: For a suggestion of 3 lines, the user would need to press the combination 3 times to accept the whole suggestion). The prompt would not show the line already accepted.

[isidorn]

@SmallLemur this sounds to me like a UX problem. Is there a mock sketch for a potential solution here? Is there some other editor which already supports this?
We can also discuss it in one of our UX weekly meetings.

[SmallLemur]

@isidorn I don’t have a mock sketch. No other editors are supporting this yet but it is a requested features. I wanted to get the discussion going (doing the same for the other editors) to understand the constraints around it as well.

[hediet]

Technically, I think this would be rather easy to implement. I'd love to hear some more UX discussion before we implement this thought.
What key-binding do you have in mind?

[isidorn]

@SmallLemur do you have some UX designers on your team that would like to help here? Once we have some good ux proposal we can bring it in our UX weekly sync on Wednesday to start the discussion.

[SmallLemur]

@isidorn No I dont have a UX designer in my team. I ll see how i can come up with a suggestion and get back to you

[YitziG]

This is similar to zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions#265. Solution for me was 'CMD + ->' to accept a word at a time.

Something similar here would be great.

[alloy]

Fish shell allows word-by-word completion using the Alt + → key-combo, which—at least on macOS—is used system-wide for navigating text word-by-word. I notice that I keep trying to automatically use this key-combo, so big +1 from me.

(This should perhaps be a feature that would need to get generic support from VS code? Did not realise this is the vscode repo.)

[isidorn]

@alloy awesome idea.
@hediet since you said this is low hanging maybe we assign to July for the initial investigation? What do you think?