such wow doge
AI WOW
Published on
(updated )

Make keyboard shortcuts for common prompts

Authors

Are you writing the same prompts over and over again? Save them to your text expander.

For example, I get this when I type ",su": 1

Please give a comprehensive summary of this transcript. {clipboard}

The clipboard placeholder is automatically replaced with whatever text is in my clipboard. Here's the Raycast config:

Raycast UI showing summary prompt snippet

Usually, my prompts are longer. For example: correct my French and help me learn.

Alternative: save prompts to project instructions

You can save common prompts into project instructions, then use a trigger phrase within a project when you want to use it.

This can be a faff—you have to select the project to start each chat, and since you're often using several LLMs (right?), you have to keep the project instructions in sync.

Scenarios where the "project instructions" approach makes sense:

  1. You want to run the prompt with a bunch of context documents (and they're saved into your project).

  2. You'll often want to run the prompt from your phone, and you don't have a text expander app on your phone.2

  3. You want to group chats within a project for other reasons (e.g. to use ChatGPT's project-scoped memory).

If you want several prompts within a single project, split them with headings, and include a trigger phrase:

--- ## Week review assistant --- **Trigger:** “Let’s do a week review for week [n]”. $PROMPT --- ## Month review assistant --- **Trigger:** “Let’s do a month review for [month]”. $PROMPT

Footnotes

  1. An unusually short prompt. Works well for me, with GPT-5 Thinking. ↩

  2. Writing this made me realise: why don't I have a text expander on my phone? I'm investigating the options... ↩