manual insertion of in-text citations

Is there a way by which one can insert citations in-text manually? In other words, rather than using the mouse to press the [insert citation] button in the toolbar, is there a way to insert citations by typing them in and then having Zotero edit them into the proper style later? From memory, endnote allowed you to type something along the lines of "{Smith @ 42}", which would then be turned into "(Smith 2006: 42)" or whatever the selected style was, after giving the appropriate command ('format' or whatever it was in endnote).

PS I should add that I'm using OOo/linux

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