[Accessibility] Preserve last position in the Copilot Chat response list view

[jooyoungseo]

Type: Feature Request

CC @meganrogge

This is a feature request and I was wondering if we could have a custom setting to configure whether to preserve the last position in the Copilot response view. Currently, the focus is set to the last response.

1. In Copilot Chat, ask multiple questions.

2. Press Ctrl+UpArrow to focus in the response list view.

3. Focus in the first response using Up/DownArrow key.

4. Move your focus back to the Chat input area via Ctrl+DownArrow.

5. Go back to the response list view via Ctrl+UpArrow.

• Note: The focus does not move to the last position (i.e., the first response(. Instead, the focus always goes to the last response.

VS Code version: Code - Insiders 1.85.0-insider (eb56719ae7653bff54989385818ef39e1cd73d29, 2023-11-24T15:21:39.004Z) OS version: Windows_NT x64 10.0.22631 Modes:

[jooyoungseo]

A possible usecase is as follows:

1. User creates multiple chat inquiries (say, 4 different questions).

2. User wants to execute the second response out of the four responses.

3. The second response contains 2 separate codeblocks.

4. user inserts codeblock 1 into editor.

5. User wants to come back to the second response in order to insert the remaining codeblock 2.

• Note: If you set the following keybinding, the focus is always set to the last Chat response, requiring user to manually locate their last visited response again.

[
  {
    "command": "runCommands",
    "key": "ctrl+k alt+f2",
    "args": {
      "commands": [
        "workbench.panel.chat.view.copilot.focus",
        "chat.action.focus",
        "editor.action.accessibleView"
      ]
    }
  }
]

[meganrogge]

We could consider a separate command for this so a user can go back to their last position without compromising the default behavior which is to go the most recently run command result.

[meganrogge]

@roblourens what do you think of this?

[roblourens]

I think I'd be fine with maintaining the focused item in the chat list instead of having cmd+up always focus the last item. That seems fine to me. I think we should move focus to the last item whenever a new chat request is submitted though.