Shortcut to insert CounterBox

Question

Is there a shortcut to inserting a CounterBox as you type in text mode? I haven't yet made extensive use of them but I can foresee them in my near future and the current method of inserting them is a little bit of a pain. Here is the current method:

Start by opening a new notebook. Create a text cell with the following content:

The current counter of title is: XXX.

Select the XXX and go to Insert > Automatic Numbering.... This will give you some options. For Counter leave it as it is (Title). And select "This counter object".

After clicking OK now the XXX will be replaced by 0 since the current count for title cells is 0. If you now create a Title cell above the one you just created then that 0 will become a 1.

I don't mind using the little GUI asking me what counter to insert. What I do not like is having to go to Insert > Automatic Numbering... all the time. I would actually prefer if possible to do some sort of input autoreplacement but this clearly would not work since we need to define what gets replaced. I thought about maybe using input alias but this again requires me to define the inputs. What I want to be able to do is something like this...

The current counter of title is [AliasDelimiter]ref[Title][AliasDelimiter]

and get

The current counter of title is 0

I'm trying to emulate $\LaTeX$ here using ref. I don't know if I have explored this question enough but so far I'm running out of ideas to make the process of entering counterboxes as painless as possible. The last idea I had was to create a palette with an input box in which you entered the tag or counter but then I realized that even if this is possible (I highly doubt it is) it would then just be the same as the Insert > Automatic Numbering... gui. So the question again:

Is there a some sort of shortcut to inserting a CounterBox?

Answer 1

This is slightly related to the question How to create a notebook element that can replace itself?

As you state, input aliases don't have inputs, so you have no way of giving it the label you want to reference, so instead, you could use document manipulation to read the current selection and replace it with a counterbox using that label. A very simplistic implimentation would be:

 autoCounter[] := With[{label = NotebookRead[EvaluationNotebook[]]}, 
   If[StringQ[label], 
    NotebookWrite[EvaluationNotebook[], CounterBox[label]]]]

Naturally to use this you need to add a shortcut to the function, but just to give an example of it's usage, here's a button that when pressed executes it, allowing you to select a bit of text and execute the function without losing your selection.

  Button["Insert counter", autoCounter[]]

So for example you would write "See Figure Figure" select the last text bit "Figure" and press the button.

This question might help with how to impliment a keyboard shortcut for the function: Automating Esc [[ Esc formatting? Otherwise searching the site will yield a lot of coverage.