Copilot suggesting a new code snippet, based on my previous text.

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   Terence Tao (tao@mathstodon.xyz)'s status on Tuesday, 05-Sep-2023 04:32:35 JST Terence Tao

   Every five to ten years, I make the effort to switch my #TeXLaTeX editor to a more modern one. This process has now iterated several times back from when I was a graduate student in the mid-1990s using vi from a UNIX shell to write in plain TeX. On the suggestion of a reader here, I installed #VSCode + #TeXLive + #LaTeXworkshop + #GithubCopilot as an upgrade from my current setup of #TeXnicCenter + #MiKTeX
   which I had been using for almost a decade, and am recording my first impressions here (which will most likely be quite naive for existing VSCode users).

   The installation had no problems (other than the four hours needed to download TeX live on a slow internet connection). I began experimenting with various features. So far I have mostly played with the user-defined code snippets feature, which can allow me for instance to create an entire corollary environment by typing in a trigger word (I chose "cor") and pressing tab (see enclosed screenshots). Strangely enough I had a version of this functionality 20 years ago during a brief period when I experimented with using Microsoft Word as a LaTeX editor purely for the ability to use Visual Basic macros (though I abandoned this shortly after due to the lack of other LaTeX-friendly features). I could certainly see myself using this feature frequently as a time-saver.

   So far the AI-powered Copilot suggestions have been mainly useful for filling out the snippet functionality: after giving a few examples of the snippets I wanted, it was able to suggest more that I could accept, again with the single click of the tab key.

   (Incidentally, the screenshots are displaying a paper which I will be putting on the arXiv shortly. Stay tuned...)