[KevinH]

Sigil and Qt has no idea what shortcuts you have at the system level. If your system level shortcuts inserts a single character like a virtual keyboard or input method, it should just work. Given Qt collects and uses its own key events, my guess is Qt is ignoring them or consuming them.

A "solution" is to use Sigil's clips feature and assign whatever shortcuts you want for the first 10 clips you create. Clips also have the capability to wrap additional text or tags around your currently selected text.

I also have a SavedSearch find/replace set up in Sigil to automatically do a set of find/replace of short placeholder text that works just like your how you describe for speeding up text insertion where passages require really long words or rare keystrokes that I continually forget.

There is also a smarten quotes plugin that intelligently converts dumb to smart quotes.