/skills UI ignores --config-dir (reads ~/.copilot/settings.json directly)

[steveisok]

Summary

When launching with copilot --config-dir <alt>, the core skill loader correctly reads <alt>/settings.json — the <available_skills> block in the session's system prompt matches the alt settings. However, the interactive /skills slash-command UI appears to read ~/.copilot/settings.json via a hardcoded path, so the "checked/unchecked" state it displays does not reflect the active session's effective configuration when --config-dir is used.

Version / environment

• GitHub Copilot CLI 1.0.35-6
• macOS Darwin 25.4.0 arm64

Impact

Two surfaces of the same setting disagree within one session:

• Loader (authoritative, drives what the model can invoke): respects --config-dir.
• /skills UI: ignores --config-dir.

This breaks workflows that use --config-dir for per-session skill/plugin overrides (e.g. ephemeral wrapper scripts that copy the real config dir to a temp location, mutate settings.json, and launch). The skill is genuinely on/off as intended, but the user's primary visibility tool (/skills) doesn't reflect it.

Reproduction

# 1. Pick any user skill currently enabled (not in disabledSkills), e.g. skill-builder.
#    Assume ~/.copilot/settings.json has disabledSkills = [].

# 2. Build an alt config dir with skill-builder disabled.
ALT=$(mktemp -d)
for e in ~/.copilot/*; do
  b=$(basename "$e")
  [[ $b == config.json || $b == settings.json ]] && continue
  ln -s "$e" "$ALT/$b"
done
sed 's|^[[:space:]]*//.*$||' ~/.copilot/config.json | jq . > "$ALT/config.json"
jq '.disabledSkills = ["skill-builder"]' ~/.copilot/settings.json > "$ALT/settings.json"

# 3. Non-interactive check — loader respects alt:
copilot --config-dir "$ALT" -p "List skill names in your <available_skills>."
# → skill-builder is ABSENT ✅

# 4. Interactive check — /skills UI does NOT respect alt:
copilot --config-dir "$ALT"
# > /skills
# → skill-builder is shown as CHECKED ❌ (expected: unchecked)

Additional evidence

• After step 4, stat on $ALT/settings.json shows mtime unchanged since creation — /skills neither wrote through to it nor invalidated it.
• ~/.copilot/settings.json mtime is also unchanged — so /skills reads it but doesn't need to write on a pure view.
• In an earlier test where settings.json in the alt dir was a symlink back to the real file, toggling /skills inside a --config-dir session leaked the change straight into ~/.copilot/settings.json. Further suggests the UI path is resolved against $HOME rather than the config-dir argument.

Expected

/skills UI should read (and write) <config-dir>/settings.json when --config-dir is passed, consistent with the loader and with how other config files under the dir are handled. Same likely applies to /plugin and /model views if they share this code path.

Workaround

None external to the CLI. A wrapper can make --config-dir affect actual skill-availability behavior, but cannot make /skills UI agree with it.