GitHub Copilot Keyboard Shortcuts Cheat Sheet

GitHub Copilot Keyboard Shortcuts Cheat SheetGitHub Copilot Fundamentals10Beginner/github-copilot/getting-started/keyboard-shortcuts/

A quick reference for every GitHub Copilot keyboard shortcut documented by GitHub, organised by editor and platform.

Key takeaways

• Tab accepts and Esc dismisses in every editor that supports inline suggestions.
• Cycling alternatives is Alt/Option with [ and ] almost everywhere; Visual Studio uses , and . instead.
• Xcode is the outlier: Tab accepts only the first line.
• Toggling Copilot on and off has no default binding — assign one yourself.
• Vim/Neovim ships no default mappings at all.

VS Code

Inline suggestions — macOS

Inline suggestions — Windows and Linux

Chat

Visual Studio

GitHub documents two default Copilot bindings for Visual Studio. Both are searchable by command name in the Keyboard Shortcuts editor.

JetBrains IDEs

The same bindings apply across the JetBrains family — IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, WebStorm, GoLand, Rider and the rest.

macOS

Windows

Linux

Eclipse

Xcode

Xcode behaves differently enough to catch people out.

Vim and Neovim

GitHub does not ship default Copilot key mappings for Vim or Neovim. You bind them yourself using standard Neovim mapping, and GitHub’s reference points at the Neovim Map documentation for how.

This is consistent with Vim’s conventions rather than an omission — but it does mean there is nothing to reproduce here, and any cheat sheet listing “default Vim Copilot shortcuts” has invented them.

Copilot CLI

Copilot CLI is a terminal interface, not an editor, so its bindings are its own.

The five that matter

If you only commit a handful to memory, make it these — they cover the vast majority of real interaction with inline suggestions.

Number three is the one most people never learn. Cycling is most valuable when the first suggestion took a fundamentally different approach from the one you wanted — iterative where you wanted recursive, broad exception handling where you wanted narrow. Alternatives frequently differ on exactly that axis, and one keystroke is cheaper than rewriting.

Cross-editor differences at a glance

If you move between editors, these are the four places the muscle memory breaks:

Everything else is consistent: Tab accepts, Esc dismisses, and Alt/Option plus a bracket cycles.

Rebinding

Every shortcut on this page can be changed.

• VS Code — the Keyboard Shortcuts editor. Search by the command names given above, such as editor.action.inlineSuggest.showNext.
• Visual Studio — the Keyboard Shortcuts editor, searching by command name (Edit.NextSuggestion).
• JetBrains — Settings → Keymap, then search for Copilot.
• Eclipse — Preferences → General → Keys.
• Xcode — rebind per command in Xcode’s key bindings preferences.
• Vim/Neovim — standard mapping; nothing is bound by default.

The one binding most worth adding yourself is toggle Copilot on/off (github.copilot.toggleCopilot in VS Code). It ships with no default, and being able to silence suggestions quickly is genuinely useful when you want to think without ghost text appearing.

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Related lessons

• Code Completion Explained — what these shortcuts are actually controlling.
• Copilot Chat — slash commands, chat variables and participants.
• 50 Commands, Actions and Workflows — the full command reference.