Copilot takes a step back: New Visual Studio options reduce unwanted interference

Although GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio can be a particularly useful assistant in terms of boosting productivity through code completions and producing boilerplate code, it can be an annoyance and a distraction in many scenarios too. Now, in accordance with developer feedback, Microsoft has introduced new options in its flagship integrated development environment (IDE) empowering developers to have more control over their code.

There are three ways in which Microsoft is making sure that distractions caused by Copilot are reduced while coding in Visual Studio. The first is particularly useful as it adds a "debounce" buffer to the time after your keystrokes so that code completions do not immediately appear on each keystroke. Having code appear and disappear on each keystroke was too distracting, so Microsoft is giving developers the option to restrict this behavior through Tools -> Options -> IntelliCode -> Advanced -> wait for pauses in typing before showing whole line completions.

If you want even more control over code completions, you can request them explicitly through the Alt + , combo or the Alt + . keyboard shortcut, which will display a hint bar as Copilot "thinks" about potential code completions. If it returns multiple suggestions, you can cycle through them through the same shortcut mentioned above and press Tab whenever you want to accept a suggestion. You can enable this behavior through Tools -> Options -> IntelliCode -> General -> uncheck Automatically generate code completions in the Editor.

Lastly, you can hide next edit suggestions (NES) through Tools -> Options -> GitHub -> Copilot -> Copilot Completions -> check Collapse Next Edit Suggestions. This will ensure that NES will only be shown when you press Tab or the margin indicator that will appear in the gutter space. You can then accept the NES by pressing Tab or dismiss it by pressing Esc.

And another way Microsoft is making GitHub Copilot more useful during your development experience is by allowing partial code completions, enabling you to accept one word at a time through the Ctrl + Right arrow shortcut and one line through the Ctrl + Down arrow shortcut. You can toggle off this behavior through Tools -> Options -> IntelliCode -> Advanced -> Whole-line completions. All of these improvements are present in the August 2025 update for Visual Studio 2022, present in version 17.14.13.

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Posted Friday 22 August 2025 at 2:03 pm AEST (my time).

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