Prompt Assistant User Guide

Table of Contents

01 Overview

Prompt Assistant is a powerful snippet manager that lives in your system tray and puts your most-used text, prompts, and code snippets just a hotkey away. Whether you’re pasting AI prompts, boilerplate emails, code templates, or canned responses, Prompt Assistant lets you organize everything into nested menus, trigger them with hotkeys or hotstrings, and paste them into any window instantly.

Key Benefits

• Instant Access — Press a hotkey and your entire snippet library pops up as a right-click style menu. Pick any item and it’s pasted into the active window automatically.
• Organized Menus — Group your snippets into nested submenus with custom icons, dividers, and labels so you can find what you need in seconds.
• Hotkeys & Hotstrings — Assign a keyboard shortcut or a short abbreviation to any snippet. Type a few letters and watch it expand into full paragraphs.
• Run Scripts Inline — Snippets aren’t limited to plain text. Prefix a snippet with {RunAHK} and Prompt Assistant will execute it as a live AutoHotkey script.
• AI Screenshot Mode — Select an area of your screen, pick a prompt from the menu, and send both to the AI Prompt Assistant module for intelligent image analysis.
• Import & Export — Share your menus with teammates or back them up as tab-delimited files. Import menus from others in one click.

02 Installation & First Launch

System Requirements

How to Install

1. Download Prompt Assistant from the-Automator.com/PromptAssist
2. Extract the zip file to a folder of your choice
3. Double-click Prompt Assistant.exe (or Prompt Assistant.ahk if running from source)
4. The app creates a data.db SQLite database on first run to store your snippets and preferences
5. The customization window appears automatically (you can turn this off later in Preferences)

03 Quick Start

Here’s everything you need to start using Prompt Assistant right away:

Primary Actions

Keyboard Shortcuts (Customization Window)

04 The Customization Window

This is where you build and organize your snippet library. The window has two main panels and a toolbar of action buttons.

4.1 Submenus Panel (Left Side)

The left panel shows a TreeView of all your submenus. Click any submenu to see its contents on the right. The tree always starts with a “Main” root — this is the top level of your popup menu.

4.2 Items Panel (Right Side)

The right panel shows a ListView with all items in the currently selected submenu. Each row shows the item’s Type, Label, Hotkey, Hotstring, and Snippet content. Hidden columns store the item’s ID, parent, icon, and position.

4.3 Breadcrumbs

Above the ListView you’ll see a Path showing where you are in the menu tree (e.g., “Main > AI Prompts > ChatGPT”). This updates as you navigate.

4.4 Toolbar Buttons

4.5 Filter

The Filter box lets you search across all your snippets. Type at least 3 characters and the ListView updates in real time, showing any item whose label, hotstring, or snippet text matches your search.

4.6 Save, Save & Close, Cancel

Save writes all your changes to the database and rebuilds the popup menu. Save & Close does the same and hides the window. Cancel discards unsaved changes and reloads the last saved state.

05 Adding & Editing Items

Click the Add button (or edit an existing item) to open the item editor. Every item has a type, a label, and optional trigger settings.

5.1 Item Types

5.2 Item Fields

06 Hotkeys & Hotstrings

Both hotkeys and hotstrings are optional — you can use the popup menu alone if you prefer. But if you have snippets you use constantly, assigning a trigger makes them lightning fast.

6.1 Hotkeys

A hotkey is a keyboard shortcut like Ctrl+Alt+P. When you press it, the snippet is pasted into whatever window is currently active. To set one, click the Hotkey field in the item editor and press your desired key combination. Check the Win checkbox to include the Windows key.

6.2 Hotstrings

A hotstring is a short abbreviation that auto-expands into your full snippet. For example, you could set the hotstring gprompt to expand into your favorite ChatGPT system prompt. Just type the abbreviation anywhere and the full text appears.

6.3 Visual Indicators in the Menu

When you open the popup menu, items with assigned triggers show small indicators next to their label:

• A yellow square indicator shows the hotstring abbreviation
• A blue diamond indicator shows the hotkey combination

07 Running AHK Scripts from Snippets

Prompt Assistant isn’t just for text — it can run AutoHotkey scripts directly from your snippet library. This turns your menu into a personal automation launcher.

7.1 How It Works

Start your snippet with the {RunAHK} tag, followed by the script code. When you trigger this snippet, instead of pasting text, Prompt Assistant saves the code to a temp file and runs it with the bundled AutoHotkey executable.

7.2 Tag Variations

7.3 Example

08 AI Screenshot Integration

Prompt Assistant includes a built-in AI screenshot mode that lets you capture a region of your screen and pair it with a prompt from your menu — then send both to the AI Prompt Assistant module for intelligent analysis.

8.1 How to Use AI Screenshot Mode

1. Turn on CapsLock (this activates screenshot mode)
2. Press Win + Left-Click and drag to select the area you want to capture
3. A red semi-transparent overlay follows your selection so you can see exactly what you’re capturing
4. Release the mouse button — a preview of your screenshot appears
5. The snippet menu automatically pops up — pick a prompt to pair with your screenshot
6. Both the image and the prompt are sent to the AI Prompt Assistant module

09 Import & Export

Share your snippet collections with others or back them up using the Import and Export features. Both use tab-delimited (.tsv) files.

9.1 Exporting a Menu

1. In the TreeView, select the submenu you want to export
2. Click the Export button
3. Choose a save location — the file is named after your submenu by default (e.g., AI Prompts-menu-export.tsv)
4. The entire submenu tree is exported, including all nested items and icons

9.2 Importing a Menu

1. Click the Import button
2. Select a .tsv file to import
3. If the filename starts with a name followed by a dash (e.g., “MyPrompts-export.tsv”), that name is used as the menu name. Otherwise, you’ll be asked to enter one.
4. The imported items are added to your database and appear in the tree immediately

10 Preferences

Access preferences from the menu bar (Preferences) inside the customization window, or from the tray icon’s Options entry.

10.1 Quick Toggles (Menu Bar)

10.2 Options Dialog

For more advanced settings — including configuring the hotkeys for showing the menu and opening the customization window, and setting library paths for AHK v1/v2 scripts — select Preferences → Options or right-click the tray icon and choose Options.

10.3 Default Hotkeys

11 Tray Icon & Menu

Prompt Assistant lives in your system tray (the small icons near your clock). Right-click the tray icon to see these options:

12 Tips & Troubleshooting

General Tips

• Organize with submenus — Create category folders like “AI Prompts”, “Email Templates”, “Code Snippets” to keep things manageable as your library grows.
• Use Shift+Click to preview — If you want to copy a snippet to clipboard without pasting, hold Shift when you click the menu item. A notification will confirm the copy.
• Search with the Filter — Don’t scroll through hundreds of items. Use the Filter box in the customization window to find snippets by name, abbreviation, or content.
• Clipboard is preserved — By default, Prompt Assistant restores your clipboard after pasting. Your previous clipboard content is safe.
• Back up your database — Your entire snippet library lives in data.db. Copy this file to keep a backup of all your work.
• Export before sharing — Use the Export feature to share specific submenus as .tsv files rather than copying the whole database.

Troubleshooting