Terminal commands run in wrong directory

[rsenden]

Copilot plugin versions:

• 0.11.0.202508291001 com.microsoft.copilot.eclipse.feature.feature.group GitHub Copilot
• 0.11.0.202509130110 com.microsoft.copilot.eclipse.feature.feature.group GitHub Copilot

My Eclipse is running on Ubuntu in WSL2, with the workspace directory located at ~/workspace and containing multiple projects that are open in Eclipse. I've seen many occasions where Copilot tries to run project-related terminal commands from my user home directory instead of the proper project directory, for example attempting to run ./gradlew build without first changing to the ~/workspace/<project> directory.

This seems to be hit and miss though; this morning, I couldn't reproduce this issue with a prompt like the following: Please run a gradle build for the xyz project and fix any errors and warnings. After making changes, please run the gradle build again to verify the changes, and continue fixing any errors or warnings.. In this case, CoPilot successfully ran a command like cd /home/rsenden/workspace/xyz && ./gradlew build --warning-mode=all.

It does raise a question though; other than explicitly mentioned the project that you want to work on in the prompt, how to make Copilot aware which project you're working on? In particular with project-specific instructions, how does Copilot know which instructions to apply if you have multiple projects open?

[jdneo]

Sometimes, LLM could generate wrong command to run. But we can definitely check if we could add/correct the context to make it more accurate. (I also meet this issue somtimes, and we have similar user feedbacks on this)

how does Copilot know which instructions to apply if you have multiple projects open?

Currently we just simply pick up all project instructions that we find to LLM.

To improve this, maybe we can

• Use the project instructions from the current file
• Or, allow user to enable/disable specific project instructions

[rsenden]

@jdneo Thanks for the response. For comparison; I have little experience with VSCode, but I think usually you only have one project/directory open per VSCode instance, correct? Whereas with Eclipse, you can have many projects open in the same workspace.

So, for IDEs that can have many projects open at the same time, wouldn't it make sense to allow users to explicitly select the relevant project(s) for a given chat? Somewhat similar to (or maybe integrated with) the 'Add Context' button? That way, the plugin knows which project instructions to include, and it can also send more accurate project information to the LLM.

Apart from having a chat button that allows for selecting the relevant projects when the chat window is already open, maybe it would also be good to allow the user to select one or more projects in the Eclipse Project Explorer and have the context menu show options like 'Add to current Copilot chat' and 'Open new Copilot chat'.

[reckart]

Even if I manually move the terminal to the right directory, it seems the agent is unable to detect the executed command has finished. It does keep on waiting even if it could already pick up the results.

[reckart]

I agree with @rsenden. In Eclipse, it would be important to be able to tell Copilot which projects - or better - which working sets are relevant.

In VSCode, the agent can simply just assume that everything is happening in one folder. So when it runs a tool, it can do so on the root of the workspace.

In Eclipse, however, there are two problems:

• projects may not have a common root - you can import folders from all over the file system and turn them into projects.
• projects may be nested inside of each other - e.g. in a multi-module Maven project.

So if an agent for example wanted to run a "grep" over selected projects, it would have to do it individually for each project and merge the results..
And even then - because of the nesting - it may get duplicate results - so it would have to deduplicate before actually doing something.

[jdneo]

Hi @reckart We would probably revisit the terminal tool in Nov or Dec.

There are some refactoring work required in the copilot language server to better support Eclipse multi folder workspace, and after that, we will check how to improve the terminal path issue.

[n614cd]

By telling copilot which project to work in (e.g. in project XXXX do ....) I get more consistent results. However, I am often still having issues with copilot opening the terminal window to the wrong folder; along with multiple commands not executing correctly in Windows cmd.
I think Powershell or a WSL Terminal might provide more consistency then Windows CMD for multiple commands.

[jdneo]

Should be addressed by #247