Add Copilot Plugin

[7flash]

[nick887]

is there any discussions? i think it is a really useful feature if we can use github copilot in helix and i will choose switch from goland to helix to get my work done

[sudormrfbin]

There are no plans to have copilot in the editor core, so this will have to wait till there is proper plugin support.

[roehst]

Waiting on this feature to move from neovim to helix for good

[lukepighetti]

Has anyone tried integrating this copilot LSP? https://github.com/TerminalFi/LSP-copilot/blob/master/language-server/package.json#L4

[yudjinn]

isnt github getting sued for how copilot takes data? I def dont think copilot should be anywhere near core

[gaetschwartz]

Is there any update on this ?

[lukepighetti]

This seems like something we can solve with LSP integration instead of the plugin system. I believe that's how folks are using it in Sublime https://forum.sublimetext.com/t/github-copilot-for-sublime-text-4-is-coming/64449/3

[kanwarujjaval]

Was anyone able to use the copilot LSP successfully?
It would be really useful specially when #2507 is merged.

[leeola]

With Copilot X's recent announcement i had to look this up for Helix, landing me here. The LSP idea sounds alright, but it would be nice to craft a deeper UX around Copilot.

Are plugin-like APIs available in Helix to, perhaps, temporarily fork Helix and integrate a Copilot Plugin directly into the forked Helix binary? Ie write a plugin directly into fork of Helix proper, even though we only intend to migrate it to a Plugin asap?

If Copilot X is useful (big if, heh) it would be nice to have a good experience in Helix for that. They have a NeoVim plugin, for comparison.

[patrick-kidger]

Also ended up here after the Copilot X announcement, FWIW. No idea if implementing it as just an LSP is technically feasible, but that would certainly be nice if so.

[mikkelfj]

The way things are going with AI these days, some level of non-trivial support would eventually be necessary, but some aspects like documentation could also belong to the build system.

Either way, I suspect we will see competitors, notably also fully open source, to Copilot-X in the coming years (or days, maybe). Also the feature set will evolve drastically.

For these reasons I think both some sense of urgency and restraint is necessary at the same time.

[7flash]

A temporary solution I have for myself is a chatgpt window running a "bridge" script in devtools. It allows chatgpt to communicate with other apps through a locally running database/job queue. If it makes sense, I can try to make it into a plugin.

[ptman]

Not just copilot, there are now several similar services. Copilot, tab9, codeium, codegeex, (vim-ai just uses chatgpt), ...

[7flash]

A temporary solution I have for myself is a chatgpt window running a "bridge" script in devtools. It allows chatgpt to communicate with other apps through a locally running database/job queue. If it makes sense, I can try to make it into a plugin.

Relevant: kazuki-sf/YouTube_Summary_with_ChatGPT#9

[ptman]

And also amazon code whisperer. I suggest title is rewritten to reflect the variety of alternatives

[mikkelfj]

I'm not quite ready for relying on LLMs for coding: This is mistral 7B

"An octahedron consists of eight vertices and eight triangular faces, with each face being made up of three vertices. Therefore, there are indeed a total of 8 x 3 = 24 individual vertices, but since a triangle is defined by three non-unique vertices, there are only 12 unique triangles in an octahedron."

[7flash]

Hi! I would like to share here my current workflow I found myself comfortable with.

https://github.com/7flash/helix-chatgpt

Notice, it works especially well with Warp Terminal, where I created a workflow/button to execute the script, but as well you can define bash function etc.

What happens when you run the script, it opens a new file with helix where you can write your prompt, and I found it being more comofrtable than any existing UI.

• You can separate user and assistant messages with |user| and |assistant| separators directly in your prompt
• You can reference local files with file:/ references and web links with http[s]:// and their content will be embedded into the prompt
• Now, you obviously won't have to embed the whole content of given webpage into your prompt and therefore, you can specify CSS selector after # hashtag in its path.
• As well, you won't have to embed full source files, so you can reference specific sections using special comments starting with "."

Just sharing here what works for me, but there isn't good documentation yet, so please feel free to contribute.

[kyfanc]

Hi everyone!

@leona thanks for your effort in creating helix-gpt. I made an attempt to integrate with ollama. @tirithen may be you would be interested in having a try with it?

Regarding llm-ls, I believe they are implementing the features as LSP custom methods, which helix built-in LSP client do not support currently.

[KiaraGrouwstra]

i tried looking this up for a bit, looks like:

• llm-ls/getCompletions
• llm-ls/acceptCompletion
• llm-ls/rejectCompletion

would you perhaps know what it would take to allow such custom LSP methods in helix?

[tirithen]

@kyfanc I'm off for a trip for a while now without my GPU, but I'll give it a try once I'm back.

Ideally in the end I think this sort of application should be a simple binary rather than a bun + typescript, to be fast and efficient, written in Rust or similar. But I also saw that it at least can build to a binary via bun (I suppose it means bundling and running a full V8 to run the lsp).

Nice that there is some progress either way! :-) And also nice with the approach to support both cloud gpt providers and ollama so the users can choose what fits them best. :-)

[RayyanNafees]

(I suppose it means bundling and running a full V8 to run the lsp).

@tirithen bun doesnt use v8 actually, it's JavaScript-core which has smaller size

[llamaha]

So I really wanted to see this feature (albeit for Claude) but I'm actually seeing good results using aichat: https://github.com/sigoden/aichat

Using this with the "insert-output" and "append-output" commands in Helix the output will write into Helix:

:insert-output aichat -r %code% Write a Rust function that will parse an i32 integer and return a result

Can run it outside of Helix just as easily:

aichat -f src/main.rs what does this code do?

Using the shell_pipe feature you can also run aichat against highlighted text

:pipe aichat -r %code% please write unit tests for this highlighted function 

Or this is also very easy using the command line by specifying the function:

aichat -f src/main.rs -r %code% please write unit tests for the function run

Note that I've been verbose on purpose for demonstration purposes. The above commands can be reduced in length and there are hotkeys for the shell commands.

[mikkelfj]

The benefit is when AIs get larger contexts and can understand compile_commands.json or compile_flags.txt

And then you can just say, add test cases for the functions below, and add a bash script to drive it. Also write a bat file for windows like the other scripts.

https://clang.llvm.org/docs/JSONCompilationDatabase.html

[rodrigopim]

So I really wanted to see this feature (albeit for Claude) but I'm actually seeing good results using aichat: https://github.com/sigoden/aichat

Using this with the "insert-output" and "append-output" commands in Helix the output will write into Helix:

:insert-output aichat -r %code% Write a Rust function that will parse an i32 integer and return a result

Can run it outside of Helix just as easily:

aichat -f src/main.rs what does this code do?

Using the shell_pipe feature you can also run aichat against highlighted text

:pipe aichat -r %code% please write unit tests for this highlighted function 

Or this is also very easy using the command line by specifying the function:

aichat -f src/main.rs -r %code% please write unit tests for the function run

Note that I've been verbose on purpose for demonstration purposes. The above commands can be reduced in length and there are hotkeys for the shell commands.

Super cool tip!

[7flash]

Hi! I would like to share here my current workflow I found myself comfortable with.

7flash/helix-chatgpt

Notice, it works especially well with Warp Terminal, where I created a workflow/button to execute the script, but as well you can define bash function etc.

What happens when you run the script, it opens a new file with helix where you can write your prompt, and I found it being more comofrtable than any existing UI.

• You can separate user and assistant messages with |user| and |assistant| separators directly in your prompt
• You can reference local files with file:/ references and web links with http[s]:// and their content will be embedded into the prompt
• Now, you obviously won't have to embed the whole content of given webpage into your prompt and therefore, you can specify CSS selector after # hashtag in its path.
• As well, you won't have to embed full source files, so you can reference specific sections using special comments starting with "."

Just sharing here what works for me, but there isn't good documentation yet, so please feel free to contribute.

Here is upgraded version: https://github.com/7flash/gurrai

[hchasens]

I'd suggest modifying Continue. It's under the Apache License and is one of the most mature open-source AI plugins. Since it's also on VSCode and JetBrains it should be well abstracted. It supports a number of backends and features.

Perhaps Helix can look into teaming with Continue sometime in the future?

[sbrow]

For anyone looking for a terminal friendly alternative to cursor, one of my co-workers just shared https://aider.chat/ with me. You might be able to make a helix plugin / language server for it? 🤷‍♂️

[David-Else]

aider is considered the best, I can recommend it too. It does seem to be amazing for some things, and rubbish for others, so give it a go, it needs a bit of experimentation to find out how it works.

[dpc]

I really want to get some AI Coding assistant in Helix

I tried lsp-ai and while it seems to have a lot of stuff done under the hood it is actually poorly integrated with Helix itself: it requires writing own configuration to extract code from reponses, etc.

Then I tried helix-gpt and this one seems to have the UX integration with Helix largely figured out, but the author/maintainer seems no longer active. The latest release seemed to have some severe issues with timeouts that remained unfixed for a while now. I was able to patch it up in a fork, and it works quite OKish for me now. If any developers would be interested in stepping up, I think it could easily be a go-to solution for Helix.

[kirawi]

I'd actually be interested in working on a fork implementing MCP since I see it becoming the standardized interface for editors, but uh (looks at the major features I'm years behind on) I don't think it'll be happening :P

[chiefMarlin]

I added 2 new commands in pr #12590 that makes it easier to use shell commands like aichat for suggestion and completion.

TLDR;
This PR introduces two new commands:

pipe-append
Takes selected text and pipes it to a shell command.
Appends the shell command's output on a new line immediately after the selected text.

pipe-inline-append
Works similarly but inserts the shell command's output directly at the cursor position, rather than on a new line.

Intent of this is to add flexibility in using shell commands for text completion and insertion.
For example using shell commands to complete code/text.
:pipe-append aichat Given the current context, suggest next line. Output only text, no explanations:
:pipe-append-inline aichat Given the current context, finish this line. Output only text, no explanations:

Adding keybindings for completion

"⁄" = ":pipe-inline-append aichat \"Given the current context, finish this line. Output only text, no explanations:\""
"€" = ":pipe-append aichat \"Given the current context, suggest next line. Output only text, no explanations:\""

[ristomatti]

(I'll be the dork stating the obvious).

One would likely want to use aichat's role feature to pass in the prompt. E.g.

[keys.normal]
"tab" = ":pipe-append aichat --role helix-context"

and then in $HOME/.config/aichat/roles/helix-context.yaml:

Given the current context, suggest next line. Output only text, no explanations:

This way you can write a longer prompt w/o cluttering the config (if needed).

[kihaya]

This method is very versatile and simple. Any ideas on how to send additional context to aichat, such as a list of the editor's open buffers? (Like Github Copilot plugin in VS Code)

[chiefMarlin]

This method is very versatile and simple. Any ideas on how to send additional context to aichat, such as a list of the editor's open buffers? (Like Github Copilot plugin in VS Code)

I think once this PR #11164 gets merged then we would be able to fetch the file/project files and provide that as context in addition to the prompt and selection.
#11164

[webdev23]

You have to add support for a text streaming pipeline.

[iocron]

Any new updates on this?