Would love to see GitHub Copilot extension in Nova. Does anyone know if this is something that can be built? Or is it something GitHub themselves have to support? Thanks!
Just chiming in from Panic’s perspective and our stance on it, as we have had several users ask if we plan to support this built-in. The short answer is “no.”
The long answer: GitHub Copilot is in very untested legal waters, as it’s potentially trained on code from GPLv3 projects (among other licenses). GitHub and Microsoft’s stance on this is that it’s fair use.
We’re concerned that if a legal challenge were brought up, it could involve anyone who is facilitating the service, which would include us as an IDE builder. While Microsoft and JetBrains have both the financial padding and legal teams to deal with something like that, we definitely don’t, so we really don’t want to take the risk.
This does not mean a third-party couldn’t build an extension for it, it’s just outlining why we likely won’t ever build support in unless something significant changes.
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If anyone is interested in looking to building a nova extension. There is a sublime copilot-lsp extension based on the official GitHub vim plugin: GitHub - TerminalFi/LSP-copilot: GitHub Copilot support for Sublime Text LSP plugin provided through Copilot.vim.
This should make it possible to build a nova extension. I don’t think it’s possible to implement the same UX as in VSCode that shows the full suggestion within the editor grayed out until the user is using tab. Sublime and vim solve it with an overlay UI that I am not a big fan of.
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Sublime Text’s CoPilot extension is based on this: LSP-copilot - Packages - Package Control
A legal challenge is no longer an “if”:
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