The discussion revolves around implementing hotkeys for canned replies in Discourse, with users expressing interest in keyboard shortcuts for efficiency. ganncamp highlights the need for such functionality, while pfaffman notes that it’s feasible. Tris20 suggests an alternative tool, Espanso, for broader text replacement. sam announces the new discourse-templates plugin, which supports hotkeys (Ctrl+Shift+I on PC, ⌘+Shift+I on Mac) and replaces the older canned-replies system. saquetim migrates ganncamp’s canned replies to the new system and explains how templates are now managed as topics in a dedicated category. Initially, ganncamp experiences issues with the shortcut, which is later resolved after a browser refresh, confirming the functionality works as intended ganncamp.
Love, love, love canned replies. They save me so much time.
AND, in my fantasy, I have hotkeys to automatically apply my most used ones. So that instead of
[move hand from keyboard to mouse] → [cog] → Canned replies → [scroll] → [clipboard button]
It’s just
Ctrl-Shift-3
Or whatever
I recently added hot keys to a plugin that I am developing. I don’t think it would be that hard to add keyboard short cuts.
I’d be curious to see the results of Jay’s work. You might also want to take a look at https://espanso.org/
Takes a little bit of getting used to, but gives you the option of providing canned replies everywhere, simply by typing a certain combination of words/text. So you could just type hello1 and it would replace hello1 with a welcome message, regardless of whether or not you are in discourse, outlook etc.
Oh I have some news here, our new discourse-templates plugin (which we would be happy to migrate you to) supports this!!!
@saquetim would be delighted to migrate you if you are interested @ganncamp
Thanks @sam! Before I say “YES!!! 
”, where can I read up on the new plugin to see if anything important changes?
I’ve replace discourse-canned-replies with discourse-templates and migrated your canned replies.
Your templates now are located in the Templates category.
The first post of each topic in this category will be used as a template.
To use the keyboard shortcut just focus any textarea on Discourse and press Ctrl+Shift+I on PCs or ⌘+Shift+I on Macs
I hope you like it.
@saquetim I just sent an email to support because I didn’t understand from your plugin announcement that it would be an even / immediate swap. I thought you would turn on templates, we would have a chance to poke around with it & announce it internally & then ask for the migration of our existing canned replies.
Can you please put back our canned replies? I use them quite heavily and some of our other folks do too.
Edit: Aaand I’ve just tried Ctrl+Shift+I and it pulled up the browser’s developer tools (Chrome/Linux)
Your canned replies were migrated and are available to be used on the “Insert templates” option in the composer.
Maybe you tried using it while I was performing the migration and they did not appeared?
Discourse templates provides the same functionality as canned-replies but its more flexible as has more features. The main change will be how you add new templates (canned replies) or edit them. They’re regular topics in a special category now.
Aside from that you should be able to use it just as you did with canned replies before.
Do you still want me to rollback the change?
I choose this combination because I could not find any clash. I’ll try Chrome on Linux.
Yes, that’s why we wanted to move (slowly! 
) in that direction.
Here’s what I was seeing in the cog menu even for topic windows I’d just opened:
A hard refresh updates the options:
So okay, I can send out a quick notification that “Canned replies” moved to “Insert template”.
And I rollback my rollback request. 
Thanks for your quick responses!
You probably was running and old version of the application in your browser cache.
I’ll look into the shortcut issue. Thank you for reporting it.
Can I ask what version of Chrome are you using?
Version 104.0.5112.101 (Official Build) (64-bit)
It just occurred to me that you probably tried the shortcut before refreshing the application.
Can you try again please and confirm that it is still not working and instead displaying the DevTools?
Cool! I hope you like it!
