Guidance on pattern to improve context for completions in an IDE

[gtritchie]

Background

Our IDE has an opt-in feature where it will tell copilot about all files in the current project by doing textDocument/didOpen on them. This could potentially be dozens, possibly even hundreds of files, given the nature of the projects in real-world use.

This was originally implemented using the vim copilot plugin, now switched to using copilot-language-server.

Question

Is this a "Good Idea"? Will it actually improve completion suggestions by providing more context, or will it quickly hit some internal limit?

When I switched this to copilot-language-server I also implemented setting workspaceFolders to true, and pass the root folder of the project as the workspace folder; is that accomplishing anything in terms of improving awareness of other files in the project (i.e. does this make the "pretend to open all files" approach redundant)?

Thanks!

[johnwilmes]

Passing the root folder as the workspace folder is great! Please do that!

As of today, passing all the files in the current project as open files might be somewhat helpful on net. Though, for users who actually tend to open files they are specifically using and interested in, in separate tabs, it might be better to just signal textDocument/didOpen for those.

However, Very Soon (🤞 ), setting the project root as the workspace folder will be sufficient to expose all the files, and reserving textDocument/didOpen for actually opened files will be clearly preferable.

[gtritchie]

Very Soon (🤞 ), setting the project root as the workspace folder will be sufficient to expose all the files, and reserving textDocument/didOpen for actually opened files will be clearly preferable

Awesome, was hoping that was already the case but Soon is better than Never. The moment that arrives I'll be ripping out our "open all the files in the background" feature.