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Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

Now _this_ is the kind of feature that really, really, really helps me. This will make my life immediately, measurably better.

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Really? Why not just a notepad? It is on per user basis. So you can't even have different reply per repo. Or have some variable like user name or repo name. I mean. This really is the same as having a text file opened and copy paste something.

Yes but you don't need to have a notepad open. Not having to have a notepad open is much easier then needing to have a notepad open.

Though the lack of variables is another issue...

  > This really is the same as having a text file opened and copy paste something.

Convenience is a feature. Two clicks is far better than "have another application open, switch over to it, find the right part in the notepad, select that bit of text, copy and paste it over."

I do a _lot_ of issue triage. The time savings is not negligible for me.

(I do agree that per-repo would be nice, but I'm happy to have this in the meantime)

On the Mac, a utility like TextExpander is great because it lets you expand abbreviations out and fill in variables along the way.

Yeah, but I don't have a Mac, and even so, I look at GitHub from a lot of places, including my phone.

That's certainly reasonable. There are likely similar utilities for other platforms[1]. For people with Macs and iOS devices, TextExpander snippets can be synced across devices so that they're available everywhere.

Saved Replies on GitHub is still a great feature, and I don't mean to imply otherwise. I'm just noting a more general solution to this problem.

[1]: http://alternativeto.net/software/textexpander/

Truth, and I do think that's useful to point out :) I use Linux and iOS, so I tend to be in a weird place for anything sync-ing, most people seem to assume Linux/Android or Mac OS/iOS.

GitHub hasn't implemented this feature (or any of the rich text editing ones) on the mobile version of their site. You'll have to force the desktop version and somewhat tediously navigate the menus to use this, though I suppose it's still an improvement over typing long messages.

Ah, that doesn't surprise me. I can mostly get away without using the desktop version these days, mostly thanks to https://github.com/blog/1642-merge-pull-requests-from-your-p... (note that image mockup...)

Also,

- On Windows there's https://autohotkey.com/

- On Linux there's (unmaintained but still working) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoKey , EDIT seems this fork is maintained: https://github.com/guoci/autokey-py3 , and it's on AUR as autokey-py3

(that doesn't remove anything to the utility of the GitHub feature, just mentioning these apps in case anyone is interested)

FYI, there are lots of tools that bring this functionality to any application or website, such as https://www.trankynam.com/atext/ or http://www.yesware.com/ for Gmail. Sharing templates isn't the bottleneck, just inserting them. No need to wait for Github to build it!

Yeah, as mentioned down thread, those are nice, but are too often tied to a particular computer.

I generally prefer the web for almost all things.

I always write bookmarklets for stuff like this. You could even make it auto-fill reporters name or similar (as I see you wished in another comment)

Yeah, I have used a Chrome extension in the past. Nice to not have to do so, though, as it now works everywhere. I don't even use Chrome anymore.

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