Copilot Workspace: Follow ups and file search improvements

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This week’s Copilot Workspace updates center around improving multi-file code generation and search capabilities. Alongside continued improvements to performance and reliability, we are releasing two features: follow ups and a simplified file search experience.

Let’s dive in!

Follow ups

When you’re working within a large repository that has complex file dependencies, even simple changes can have significant impacts across the codebase. Invoking Copilot Workspace’s new follow up capability triggers a thorough check across the codebase, automatically editing the necessary files if any follow ups are detected.

Whether you have changed a function name, modified function parameters, or modified a shared class definition, Copilot’s follow ups can swiftly handle dependent fixes across your repository, saving you time and increasing confidence in your changes before you raise a PR!

File search experience improvements

We’ve updated the file search experience to help you maintain context in your file tree while searching for other files to open. Rather than filtering the file tree on search, we now return results in a separate menu that searches the entire repository rather than what is currently visible in the tree. You can open files in new tabs directly from this search.

Providing feedback

Please give your feedback in our GitHub Discussion. We’d love to hear your thoughts!

Secret scanning detects Base64-encoded GitHub tokens

GitHub continually updates its detectors for secret scanning with new patterns and upgrades of existing patterns, ensuring your repositories have comprehensive detection for different secret types.

GitHub now automatically detects Base64-encoded secrets for the following token types:

  • GitHub personal access tokens
  • GitHub OAuth access tokens
  • GitHub user to server tokens
  • GitHub server to server tokens.

GitHub secret scanning protects users by searching repositories for known types of secrets such as tokens and private keys. By identifying and flagging these secrets, our scans help prevent data leaks and fraud. See the full list of supported secrets in the documentation.

Learn more about secret scanning or join the discussion on our dedicated GitHub community.

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Feed activity is now sorted chronologically

In your homepage activity Feed, you can see activity from other users, content GitHub recommends for you in “Suggested for you” modules, and trending developers/repositories.

The sorting algorithm we’ve had in place in the Feed could lead to these items being placed out of chronological sequence. We’ve heard your feedback, though, that the out-of-sequence ordering of activity can make it difficult to be effective with daily tasks in GitHub.

So now, we’re sorting all activity in the Feed chronologically. The newest activity appears first and older activity appears as you scroll down your Feed.

As part of this change, we also merged the design and UI to be more consistent across individual feeds and organization feeds, by slightly modifying the card layout in organization feeds. These minor template differences should not impact the content that appears for you.

Learn more and give us your feedback

For more information and discussion on these changes, join us in this discussion.

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