Feature request: allow Copilot agents to read user-opened terminal panes with...
Nobody has claimed this yet.
Assessment
- Difficulty
- 5/5
- Estimated time
- Over a week
- Newbie friendliness
- 35/100
Research direction
Start at the /chat terminal-pane experience and review how terminal actions such as “Send terminal to chat” or Ctrl+L could be represented in the app. Done means explicit, visible, time-limited, terminal-scoped and revocable consent lets Copilot read the approved terminal context without default access.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Description
Feature request: allow Copilot agents to read user-opened terminal panes with explicit consent.
Use case:
I opened a terminal manually inside the GitHub Copilot app and ran an external agent CLI (ant). When I asked Copilot if it could see the terminal output, it could detect that a terminal panel existed from context, but it could not read the scrollback because the terminal instance was not accessible to the agent.
Desired behavior:
- User opens a terminal manually and runs commands.
- User asks Copilot to inspect the terminal, or clicks a terminal action such as “Send terminal to chat”.
- App asks for explicit per-terminal consent, or the click itself acts as an intentional share action.
- If approved, Copilot can read current viewport / recent scrollback / selected scrollback / full scrollback.
- Access should be time-limited, visible, scoped to that terminal, and revocable.
Prior art / UX reference:
In Antigravity IDE, when a terminal is open, the top bar has an @ action, also available via Ctrl+L, labeled “Send terminal to chat”. This is a useful interaction pattern: the user explicitly chooses to attach/share the terminal context with the chat instead of the agent having automatic access.
Why this matters:
This would improve debugging and coordination when using external agent CLIs (ant, agy, copilot) inside Copilot app project worktrees. It would avoid manual copy/paste of terminal output while preserving the right privacy model: no terminal access by default, only explicit user-initiated sharing.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| App version | 1.1.22 |
| OS | Windows 10.0.26200 |
| Theme | GitHub |
| Path | /chat |
| Tenure | Day 1 |
- Dominant language
- No language data
- Stars
- 2.1k
- Forks
- 157
- PR merge metrics
- No merged PRs in 30d
Contributor guide
First steps
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- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
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