Eclipse Plug-in for Copilot

Thursday, May 15, 2025 - 00:42 by Rome Li
Basics
This proposal is in the Project Proposal Phase (as defined in the Eclipse Development Process) and is written to declare its intent and scope. We solicit additional participation and input from the community. Please login and add your feedback in the comments section.
Parent Project
Eclipse Project
Proposal State
Community Review
Background

GitHub Copilot is an AI coding assistant that helps developers write code faster and with less effort, allowing developers to focus more energy on problem solving and collaboration. In February 2025, a plugin was released for Eclipse IDE. We are now making the plugin an Eclipse project and part of Eclipse.

Scope

Eclipse Plug-in for Copilot provides an AI coding assistant for the Eclipse IDE that helps you write code faster and with less effort, allowing you to focus more energy on problem solving and collaboration.

Description

Eclipse Plug-in for Copilot provides code completion suggestions, chats, and deals with coding tasks using agents. It's a client app that talks to the GitHub online services. The focus of the app is UI integrations to enable GitHub Copilot features in Eclipse IDE. GitHub online services are not part of the scope.

Licenses
Eclipse Public License 2.0
Legal Issues

GitHub/Microsoft owns the trademarks and there's an end user agreement under GitHub terms. We'll incorporate our legal team to figure out how to move forward with these.

GitHub trademark policy: https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/content-removal-policies/github-trademark-policy

GitHub Customer Agreement General Terms: https://github.com/customer-terms/general-terms

GitHub Copilot Product Specific Terms: https://github.com/customer-terms/github-copilot-product-specific-terms

Why Here?

This plug-in is for Eclipse and we want it to part of Eclipse as well. Conducting the development in the public is to better engage with the developer community and provide transparency. Being part of Eclipse can help open up the user funnel and bringing AI to Eclipse can boost the productivity of all Eclipse users. A win-win case for both parties.

Future Work

Currently, a subset of Copilot features are available in Eclipse. It's our long term commitment to enable as many features as possible in the future. Here's the full list of features that GitHub Copilot has:

https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/about-github-copilot/github-copilot-features

 

Project Scheduling

We iterate on a monthly cadence, meaning every month there's a release to the stable channel (Eclipse marketplace). We are also publishing nightly build for early adopters. We are also releasing hotfixes for serious patches.

People
Project Leads
Rome Li
Sheng Chen
Committers
Ethan Hou
Peter Tao
Hang Wang
Nick Zhu
Rome Li
Sheng Chen
Interested Parties

GitHub, Microsoft

Source Code
Initial Contribution

This project was started from scratch and Microsoft/GitHub owns the source code in the repo.

Here's the list of dependencies used:

Eclipse InstallableUnit Dependencies

Maven Dependencies

  • org.mockito:mockito-core
    • Version: 5.14.2
    • Type: jar
    • License: MIT
  • org.mockito:mockito-junit-jupiter
    • Version: 5.14.2
    • Type: jar
    • License: MIT
  • org.objenesis:objenesis
    • Version: 3.4
    • Type: jar
    • License: Apache-2.0

npm Dependencies

Source Repository Type
GitHub
Source Repositories
https://github.com/microsoft/copilot-eclipse