Fixing GitHub Copilot Inline Suggestions

One of the most frustrated things about using GitHub Copilot has been the default behavior of inline suggestions. If I were piloting a plane, it would be very annoying if the copilot decided to reach over and grab my controls any time it pleased.

However, there are times when I do wish I had access to these suggestions, so I do not want to disable them completely.

The following shows how to disable inline suggestions by default and invoke it with an explicit keyboard shortcut.

Disable Inline Suggestions

Add the following to your VSCode user settings. This disables inline suggestions.

{
    // other settings . . .

    "editor.inlineSuggest.enabled": false
}

Trigger Inline Suggestions

When you wish to invoke inline suggestions, use the editor.action.inlineSuggest.trigger vscode command.

By default, this is bound to alt+\ on windows and opt+\ on mac.

Accept Inline Suggestions

One the suggestion appears, it can be accepted as normal with tab. Or, using the editor.action.inlineSuggest.acceptNextWord and editor.action.inlineSuggest.acceptNextLine vscode commands, the first parts of the suggestions can be accepted. These are helpful when only the first portion of the inline suggestion is desired.

By default, editor.action.inlineSuggest.acceptNextWord is bound to ctrl+right on windows and cmd+right on mac. But, editor.action.inlineSuggest.acceptNextLine has no keybinding, so you will need to make a custom shortcut.