Copilot Plugin for IntelliJ IDEA - Disable Welcome Panel

[martin-fuhrer]

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Every new project opened in IntelliJ IDEA shows by default the "Welcome to GitHub Copilot" panel in the side bar. For new users this might be of some value to get familiar with the plugin. But after using the plugin for far over a year, it becomes quite tedious to click this panel away for each and every project. Is there a way to prevent this welcome panel from appearing?

[Akash1134]

Hi @martin-fuhrer ,

The Welcome panel show up the first time Copilot is installed or if the user settings are carried over from a previous version of your IDE (i.e: - if you've changed your IDE version and opted not to use the settings from the previous version, most JetBrains IDEs work this way). You can however, adjust the plugin settings with these steps:

• Open your IDE IntelliJ IDEA.
• Go to File > Settings (or IntelliJ IDEA > Preferences on macOS).
• Navigate to Plugins and find Copilot.
• Check for any settings related to the welcome panel and disable it if available.

If this does not change the outcome, we'd require concrete and detailed steps (preferably a video) to help reproduce the issue, that way we can investigate that behavior.

Thanks!

[martin-fuhrer]

Hi @Akash1134,

I don't see any settings under Plugins -> GitHub Copilot. Instead I see some copilot related settings under Languages & Frameworks -> GitHub Copilot. But there is nothing related to the welcome panel.

I'm talking about this panel here:

It appears every time I open a new project, even without stopping IntelliJ IDEA in between.

[Akash1134]

Could you please share a video illustrating the issue? We will share it with the product team for further diagnosis.

Also, share the logs to verify system settings. The Copilot extension logs to the IDEA log location for IntelliJ plugins.

• In your JetBrains IDE, open the Help menu.
• Go to Show Log in Finder. (Copy/paste to reply)

[martin-fuhrer]

OK, I created a small video. I changed to a Windows environment, as I'm working with the official release of IntelliJ IDEA there. On the mac I have the EAP version. But the behaviour is everywhere the same.

I created a very small dummy project, just to demonstrate the issue. What I'm doing in the video:

1. open the project -> the copilot welcome panel is shown
2. hide the copilot welcome panel
3. close the project
4. reopen the project -> the copilot welcome panel is not there
5. close the project
6. delete the .idea folder from the project
7. reopen the project -> the copilot welcome panel is there again

Of course the same happens when opening a new project which doesn't have an .idea folder yet

copilot.mp4

idea.log