Emacs Copilot Jupyter

Setup Emacs (for Windows)

I needed to setup emacs on windows for the first time. Here are my steps:

• Download it from GNU http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/windows/emacs-29/emacs-29.1.zip
• Extract it to: C:\emacs-29.1
• Navigate to: C:\emacs-29.1\bin\runemacs.exe > right-click > Show more options > Pin to taskbar

This gives us a basic working emacs but for some reason the font seemed super choppy so I went and downloaded Menlo for a bit more of an OS X feel. In Emacs:

• Options > Set default font > Menlo
• Options > Save options

You’ll get one of these in your .emacs config:

(custom-set-faces
 ;; custom-set-faces was added by Custom.
 ;; If you edit it by hand, you could mess it up, so be careful.
 ;; Your init file should contain only one such instance.
 ;; If there is more than one, they won't work right.
 '(default ((t (:family "Menlo" :foundry "outline" :slant normal :weight bold :height 120 :width expanded)))))

Did a bunch of other setup, using a slightly touched version of modus-vivendi. Add my comfort packages, but at this point your tastes probably vary from mine. If you want to get my config as is it’s available on GitHub: https://github.com/peluche/dotfiles/blob/master/.emacs.

Copilot for Emacs

The Copilot plugin I’ll be using https://github.com/zerolfx/copilot.el is based on the Neovim plugin. Which in turn works by extracting JS files from the VSCode plugin and running them localy. As a result we need NodeJs on the machine so download and run https://nodejs.org/en/download.

At the time of writing the plugin is not on ELPA/MELPA so we endup with something like

;; package manager
;; ---------------
(require 'package)
(require 'use-package)
(require 'quelpa)
(require 'quelpa-use-package)
(add-to-list 'package-archives
             '("melpa" . "https://melpa.org/packages/") t)

;; Copilot config
(use-package copilot
             :quelpa (copilot :fetcher github
			      :repo "zerolfx/copilot.el"
			      :branch "main"
			      :files ("dist" "*.el"))
	     :config (progn
		       (define-key copilot-mode-map (kbd "C-S-<return>")
				   #'copilot-accept-completion)
		       (define-key copilot-mode-map (kbd "C-S-<right>")
				   #'copilot-accept-completion-by-word)
		       (define-key copilot-mode-map (kbd "C-S-<down>")
				   #'copilot-accept-completion-by-line)
		       (define-key copilot-mode-map (kbd "C-S-<up>")
				   #'copilot-next-completion)
		       (define-key copilot-mode-map (kbd "C-S-<left>")
				   #'copilot-previous-completion))
	     :init (global-copilot-mode))

Run a on-time auth with M-x copilot-login.

For the shortcut I deviated a bit from what everyone else seemed to use C-M-<direction> and went with C-S-<direction> because (1) the C-M-.. prefix is already used for cursor movement for me. And (2) on a Windows keyboard the Meta key is shifted on slot to the right compared to a Mac and it messes with my muscle memory.

TL;DR: Paste the blob in your .emacs. During file editing when some grey text appear press Control Shift Enter to accept it.

Note: The grey text gets a bit smarter if you write a comment first to give it inspiration.

Jupyter

Here’s the sad news. As far as I can tell there is no good solution to write Jupyter notebooks from Emacs. The builtin browser Eww doesn’t handle JS and CSS gracefully so the web interface is unusable. There are some effort to use IPython kernels from Emacs and replace the Markdown with Org-mode but it’s too invasive for my taste. And one person articulated a Chrome with Emacs to edit single notebook cells.

So after bashing my head for a day I endup in a suboptimal local maximum. VSCode has a great Jupyter plugin, a great Copilot plugin, and a bunch of not quite Emacs 😔 keybindings. But it beats editing code in a web browser.