When reviewing themes for the WordPress.org theme directory, you will find that there are mistakes that are more common than others. This means that we often use the same type of messages in different tickets and reviews.

We can use this fact to make our reviews faster. I have done so many reviews that many of the texts are in my muscle memory, but I still save some of my reviews with the purpose of being able to copy paste them into other reviews later.

But we can improve on this further by using the code editor of our choice to add the most common texts for us.

I use VS code, and I followed these instructions to create my own review specific snippets:

In VS Code, go to File, Preferences, and select user Snippets

Now you can choose to create a snippet for a specific language, or a global snippet file. I write my reviews in a simple .txt file so I created a global file.

Documentation for how to create a new snippet is included in the file header of the new file, which made it very easy.

Place your global snippets here.
Each snippet is defined under a snippet name and has a scope, prefix, body and description. 
Add comma separated ids of the languages where the snippet is applicable in the scope field. 
If scope is left empty or omitted, the snippet gets applied to all languages. The prefix is what is used to trigger the snippet and the body will be expanded and inserted. 
Possible variables are: 
$1, $2 for tab stops, $0 for the final cursor position, 
and ${1:label}, ${2:another} for placeholders. 
Placeholders with the same ids are connected.
Example:
"Print to console": {
	"scope": "javascript,typescript",
 	"prefix": "log",
 	"body": [
 		"console.log('$1');",
 		"$2"
 	],
 	"description": "Log output to console"
 }

I decided not to use a scope, here is an example of one of my custom snippets:

"Missing license": {
	"prefix": "missing license",
	"body": [
	"Themes are required to be 100% GPL compatible.",
	"Reviewers can not confirm that a theme is GPL compatible unless all the license information is included in the theme.",
	"Missing license information for:",
	"(Placeholder: include additional information like a script name or image used in screenshot)",
        "$0",
	],
	"description": "Missing license information for included assets."
},

So when I write my review, all I need to do to add the information about the missing license is to start typing “license” or “missing” and press enter.

Here is the first iteration of the file: Download.