Visual Studio Code 1.98: GitHub Copilot can now handle graphics

The February update for Visual Studio Code has been released. Version 1.98 of Microsoft's free source code editor allows interaction with graphics in GitHub Copilot, brings a new view mode for the Copilot feature Next Edit Suggestions and reworks the terminal shell suggestions via IntelliSense.

Updates for GitHub Copilot: Copilot Vision, Collapsed Mode and LLM selection

As in the last releases, additional features for GitHub Copilot are on board. Copilot Vision is included as a preview: End-to-end vision support in GitHub Copilot Chat. This means that developers can now attach graphics and interact with graphics in chat prompts. According to the VS Code team, one use case is for developers to attach a screenshot of VS Code in the event of a debugging error and ask GitHub Copilot for a solution. Attaching a UI mockup and asking Copilot for suitable HTML and CSS code for its implementation is also a possible use case.

Only the large OpenAI GPT-4o language model is currently available for this feature. However, support for Anthropic Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Google Gemini 2.0 Flash is expected to follow soon. The supported graphic formats are currently JPEG/JPG, PNG, GIF and WEBP.

The copilot feature Next Edit Suggestions (NES) introduced in version 1.97 is still in preview mode, but has gained the Collapsed Mode. When using this “collapsed” mode, only an indicator for a code editing suggestion appears on the left-hand side. Developers can trigger the display of the suggestion by navigating to it via the Tab key. Suggestions for subsequent changes then also appear, until developers do not accept a suggestion.

Collapsed mode is deactivated by default. It can be activated via editor.inlineSuggest.edits.showCollapsed or in the NES indicator menu:

Another GitHub Copilot update concerns the language model selection. It was already possible to change the model for Copilot Chat and Edits. Microsoft has now also extended this option to inline suggestions. The available models may change over time. New additions in this release are the major language models OpenAI GPT-4.5 and Anthropic Claude 3.7 Sonnet, both as previews.

Refined suggestions in Terminal IntelliSense

The terminal shell suggestions using IntelliSense should now work much better for Bash, zsh, fish and PowerShell, as the VS Code team has added completion specifications, refined command line parsing and revised file and folder completion. Terminal IntelliSense can be activated via terminal.integrated.suggest.enabled.

All further details on Visual Studio Code 1.98 can be found in the announcement article. The March update for Python in Visual Studio Code has also been released, including changes for Python shell integration and hovering in notebooks and Python files.

(mai)