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Conflicting statements regarding GitHub Copilot content exclusion support in IDEs

Open KyleEales opened this issue 1 month ago • 2 comments

Code of Conduct

What article on docs.github.com is affected?

https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/how-tos/configure-content-exclusion/exclude-content-from-copilot

What part(s) of the article would you like to see updated?

Conflicting statements regarding content exclusion support in IDEs

There appears to be a contradiction in the GitHub documentation for Configuring content exclusion for your repository/organization/enterprise.

  1. Early in the page, it states:

"GitHub Copilot CLI, Copilot coding agent, and Agent mode in Copilot Chat in IDEs, do not support content exclusion."

This indicates that content exclusions do not work in IDEs when using Copilot through these modes.

  1. Later, the documentation provides instructions for testing content exclusions in IDEs (VS Code, JetBrains, Visual Studio, Vim/Neovim), implying that exclusions do work in IDEs, which contradicts the earlier statement.

Suggestion:

  • Clarify which parts of Copilot respect content exclusions.

Additional information

No response

KyleEales avatar Nov 16 '25 15:11 KyleEales

Thanks for opening this issue. A GitHub docs team member should be by to give feedback soon. In the meantime, please check out the contributing guidelines.

welcome[bot] avatar Nov 16 '25 15:11 welcome[bot]

@KyleEales The way the instructions for checking to see if Copilot is ignoring excluded files are written, I'm guessing the basic chat mode supports excluding files. But at this point there are so many versions/modes for Copilot it might be worthwhile to list the supported ones explicitly. I don't know what all of them are, even using Copilot almost daily. That note is also really unclear in its wording, so I'm going to clarify that for sure.

Sharra-writes avatar Nov 17 '25 21:11 Sharra-writes