Copilot in Emacs

I haven't done anything fancy with integrating AI tools into Emacs, but after playing with Copilot a bit in VSCode, I decided that I wanted to at least get the most basic autocomplete feature working.

All I did was install copilot.el in Emacs, and now I can use it to autocomplete.

Let's record a demo while I write this blog post!

Emacs Copilot Demo

It supports the basic features I wanted:

  • ghost text
  • accepting suggestions with TAB
  • cycling through suggestions (I bound to s-up and s-down)
  • Accepting by word (I bound to C-right)

Honestly I haven't used it often enough to get those in my muscle memory (except TAB), but I have definitely gotten mileage out of it.

Maybe eventually I'll rig up more sophisticated LLM integrations into Emacs. Meanwhile I am exploring other tools more often.

What I'd really like for completion in Emacs is a way to use other models such as Claude or other LLMs instead of Copilot, but I haven't found a good way to do that yet. There are a few that support local models:

  • emacs-copilot ... 2 years old and I'm unclear what models I could run that would work well.
  • wingman seems to be actively maintained. Requires a LLama model.

There's also codeium.el which appears to use Windsurf as its backend.

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