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:

1
Day 9: Rope Bridge day
2
#11 by simonw was closed Dec 9, 2022
3
7
4
Day 8: Treetop Tree House day
5
#10 by simonw was closed Dec 8, 2022
6
27
7
Day 7: No Space Left On Device day
8
#9 by simonw was closed Dec 7, 2022
9
40
10
Day 6: Tuning Trouble day
11
#8 by simonw was closed Dec 5, 2022
12
16
13
Day 5: Supply Stacks day
14
#6 by simonw was closed Dec 5, 2022
15
17
16
Day 4: Camp Cleanup day
17
#5 by simonw was closed Dec 4, 2022
18
14
19
Day 3: Rucksack Reorganization day
20
#4 by simonw was closed Dec 3, 2022
21
28
22
Day 2: Rock Paper Scissors day
23
#3 by simonw was closed Dec 3, 2022
24
18
25
Day 1: Calorie Counting day
26
#1 by simonw was closed Dec 1, 2022
27
2

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

1
Day 1: Calorie Counting - 2 comments

So I typed the following below:

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

3
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:

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