Software to be able to insert text templates into current window

Question

Here's my scenario: I'm a forum admin and people ask the same questions over and over again, and I want to answer them with a boilerplate post that says something like:

This is a common question and you can find a good answer for it here: example.com/useful-link

Ideally, the forum would detect the redundant question and offer the answer automatically, but not everything works as well as StackOverflow. So I have to type the same text over and over again, or else save it somewhere and copy/paste it over and over again.

Therefore, I'm looking for some software or browser plug-in that would let me configure multiple text snippets, but then assign them to hotkeys so that I could just hit, say, Control+Alt+1 to insert the first snippet into the current window, and so on. Or maybe one key would show the GUI, and then I could choose the snippet I want.

I need this for Windows, generally, but my use-case is within a web page, so a browser plug-in would work too. Open Source and free is nice too, but I'd pay a reasonable amount if needed.

Answer 1

AutoHotKey is a powerful solution for such things.

You'll need to write an autostart script, which syntax is not quite trivial (and make sure AutoHotKey starts with Windows), but in your case it can be a one-liner.

^!1::Send, This is a common question...

In your case, I would probably make it a 'hotstring' rather than 'hotkey':

::cq!::This is a common question...

This means that instead of pressing a special keyboard shortcut, you type some special text (that you don't expect to appear normally), like cq!, and it gets automatically replaced with your text in any text edit field.

As a practical example, I use such hotstrings for all the email addresses that I need to type way too often in web forms (which sometimes even foolishly have protection from copy-pasting).

::nm@::niccolo.machiavelli@gamil.com  ;now you just type 'nm@'

You can make such shortcuts work only in a specific window (e.g. browser): check #IfWinActive. Generally, possibilities are endless; if you want more, check the documentation.

Note: the current AutoHotKey release has a somewhat weird combination of 'V2 Alpha' and 'V1 deprecated'. I never used V2; but I can attest that V1 is quite stable and sufficient. The examples above apply to V1; I'm not sure if they are compatible with V2.