You're reading from The GitHub Copilot Handbook A practical guide to transforming the software development life cycle with GitHub Copilot

Product type Paperback

Published in Nov 2025

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781806116638

Length 290 pages

Edition 1st Edition

Tools

CoPilot

Concepts

Web Design

Authors (2):

Rob Bos

Randy Pagels

View More author details

Table of Contents (18) Chapters

Preface

1. What is GitHub Copilot?

2. GitHub Copilot Explained FREE CHAPTER

3. Getting Started with Generative AI

4. Choosing the Right GitHub Copilot Plan

5. Getting Started with GitHub Copilot

6. Mastering GitHub Copilot in Your IDE: Inline Suggestions, Chat, and Agent Mode

7. Going Beyond Code: Debugging, Terminal, and Collaboration with GitHub Copilot

8. Exploring GitHub Copilot Integrations

9. Collaborating with Copilot on GitHub.com: Issues, PRs, Reviews, and Coding Agent

10. Extending GitHub Copilot with the Model Context Protocol (MCP)

11. Getting the Most Out of GitHub Copilot

12. Navigating the GitHub Copilot Learning Curve

13. Building an Internal GitHub Copilot Community

14. Changing the Narrative: Reframing Engineering with AI

15. Unlock Your Exclusive Benefits

Unlock this Book’s Free Benefits in 3 Easy Steps

16. Other Books You May Enjoy

17. Index

GitHub Copilot Edit Mode: instantly refactoring and improving code

GitHub Copilot Edit Mode takes the concept of AI-powered coding a step further, allowing you to instruct GitHub Copilot to modify, refactor, or improve your existing code and configuration files using natural language prompts. Instead of manually rewriting a function, reformatting SQL, or updating infrastructure code, you simply tell GitHub Copilot what you want changed.

The result? Faster improvements and more time focused on logic rather than rote edits.

Edit Mode is geared toward immediately implementing the changes you are asking for, in the files that are relevant to the question at hand. This makes it a lot easier to apply these changes compared to when in Ask Mode, where you have to copy and paste the changes yourself.

Scenarios for edits

Edits can be applied across programming languages, scripts, SQL, and infrastructure-as-code files, making this feature useful no matter what type of project...