Reformatting text with Copilot

I wanted to write alt text for the following screenshot (of this page), so I could include it in this post on Mastodon.

A screenshot of a list of issues in GitHub - they are in the incorrect order and have a bunch of metadata associated with each one

For my alt text I wanted just the concept I was trying to illustrate - which is the number of comments attached to each of those issues.

I hit "select all" in my browser and pasted the following block of text into a new document in VS Code:

Day 9: Rope Bridge day #11 by simonw was closed Dec 9, 2022 7 Day 8: Treetop Tree House day #10 by simonw was closed Dec 8, 2022 27 Day 7: No Space Left On Device day #9 by simonw was closed Dec 7, 2022 40 Day 6: Tuning Trouble day #8 by simonw was closed Dec 5, 2022 16 Day 5: Supply Stacks day #6 by simonw was closed Dec 5, 2022 17 Day 4: Camp Cleanup day #5 by simonw was closed Dec 4, 2022 14 Day 3: Rucksack Reorganization day #4 by simonw was closed Dec 3, 2022 28 Day 2: Rock Paper Scissors day #3 by simonw was closed Dec 3, 2022 18 Day 1: Calorie Counting day #1 by simonw was closed Dec 1, 2022 2

I wanted to reformat this to be a list of items that looked like this:

Day 1: Calorie Counting - 2 comments

So I typed the following below:

Reformatted sorted by number, with the " day" removed and with just the title and the number of comments: Day 1: Calorie Counting - 2 comments

Giving it an example of the first item I wanted proved essential, since it let it understand that the 2 on its own line was what I meant by "number of comments".

I hit "tab" a few times and Copilot completed the rest of the list for me:

Day 1: Calorie Counting - 2 comments Day 2: Rock Paper Scissors - 18 comments Day 3: Rucksack Reorganization - 28 comments Day 4: Camp Cleanup - 14 comments Day 5: Supply Stacks - 17 comments Day 6: Tuning Trouble - 16 comments Day 7: No Space Left On Device - 40 comments Day 8: Treetop Tree House - 27 comments Day 9: Rope Bridge - 7 comments

Here's what that looked like:

Animated GIF showing Copilot completing each of those lines for me one at a time

It also made up a suggestion for Day 10 - "Day 10: The 'C' Language: vb - 1 comment" - no idea where it got that idea from!

Created 2022-12-09T11:52:47-08:00 · Edit