Chat

The chat lives in the twinny sidebar. Type a question and press Enter or Send. Answers stream in, and you can stop one at any time with Ctrl+Shift+/ or the stop button. Answers come from your active chat provider, chosen with Use this provider in the Providers tab; the empty chat shows which model will answer.

Open the chat in a full editor tab with Open twinny panel chat (the full-screen icon at the top of the sidebar) when you want more room, or to keep the sidebar for the Providers or Embeddings tab.

Adding context

Type @ in the message box to attach context: a file, a symbol, the current problems, the git diff, the terminal’s last output, or a search of the workspace index. Right-click a file or a selection for Add file to context and Add Selection to Context. Selected code is attached automatically when you send. Paste an image for vision models.

Every source, what it sends and its limits are on Context and mentions.

Answers

Code blocks in an answer have actions:

• copy copies the block.
• new file opens it in a new untitled document with the right language.
• apply puts it into the active editor as an inline edit you accept or reject: over the selection if there is one, otherwise over the lines it rewrites, or at the cursor.
• terminal pastes a shell block into the twinny terminal, ready to run when you press Enter.

Under a message you can edit it and re-send (later messages are dropped), regenerate the answer, or delete it. When @workspace was used, a context line under the answer shows which chunks were retrieved, their reranker scores, and a preview, with a link to open each one at its lines.

Conversations

Conversations are saved between sessions in VS Code’s global state. Open Conversation history (the clock icon) to search them, rename or delete one, or clear them all; they are grouped by day. Start a new chat (the plus icon) begins a fresh conversation; the title of a conversation is generated from its first exchange.

The whole conversation is sent with each message, so a very long one eventually exceeds the model’s context. Start a new conversation when the topic changes.

Editor commands

Right-click selected code for:

• Explain, which asks the chat to explain the selection. When a workspace index exists, related code is looked up to inform the explanation.
• Refactor, Add types, Generate docs and Edit with instruction…, which change the code in place through inline edit.
• Write tests, which writes tests to a sibling test file.

Suggestions in an empty chat

An empty chat shows a row of suggestion buttons built from the templates you have enabled in Manage twinny templates (the book icon). Each runs that template over the current selection. Turn off the ones you never use.

Tokens and stopping

twinny.numPredictChat (512) caps the length of one answer. If answers are cut short, raise it; the model’s own context window still applies. twinny.temperature (0.2) applies to chat too.

Customising the prompts

The system message and every command’s prompt are Handlebars files in ~/.twinny/templates/. Change the tone, the language of answers, or the rules the model follows; see Prompt templates.