The Copilot for CLI technical preview ended on March 21, 2024.
GitHub Copilot in the CLI is now generally available.
The terminal is a powerful place: In a single line of arcane shell magic, you
can transform files and parse data at will. But it can take many years of
regular use to become a shell wizard. Even with solid proficiency, most of us
regularly need to optimistically type --help
or scroll through man pages.
Oftentimes, you simply turn to a web search, hopefully finding something like a
relevant StackOverflow answer that can get you to the next step.
What if you had a shell wizard by your side, with comprehensive knowledge of flags
and the entire AWK language? When you needed something more
complicated than cd myrepo
, you could turn to this guru and just ask - in
regular, human language, what you wanted to get done!
Three modes of interaction
Copilot for CLI provides three shell commands: ??
, git?
and gh?
:
??
is meant as the general-purpose goto for arbitrary shell commands. It will compose commands and loops, and throw around obscurefind
flags to satisfy your query.
git?
is used for searching specifically forgit
invocations. Compared to??
it will be more powerful at generating Git commands, and your queries can be more succinct when you don't need to explain that you're in the context of Git.
gh?
combines the power of the GitHub CLI command and query interface with the convenience of having AI generate the complicated flags andjq
expressions for you.