I've just used this extensively to build 200 Shortcuts for my event-based automation app on macOS [0], because some actions you simply can't do without Shortcuts: changing Focus Mode, toggling Accessibility functions like Color Filters, accessing the Private Cloud Compute model etc.
I also wrote about how Claude was able to basically learn the language from scratch and write those fully compilable Shortcuts for me [1] because it was mind boggling to me that an LLM can do that. Curiously, this is becoming more and more normal in my mind.
When you say Claude learned it. That's in the current context window it is able to do that, right? Or is there a more permanent way to make it learn something?
Cool to hear Claude was able to learn it. I was planning on leveraging it in a future version of this project I was hacking on that lets you execute shortcut actions as tools (without creating actual shortcuts): https://tarq.net/posts/action-relay-shortcut-actions-mcp/
are you certain that it wasn't included in the training data?
I saw someone do this awhile ago with a low resource language (I think it might've been Abkhaz?) with seemingly-incredible results, and eventually everyone came to understood that, even though it wasn't officially supported, Abkhaz materials had been in the training data
Well, that’s a domain that has caught my attention so I’ll give this more weight (ltg). I recall novel Mac apps that weren’t quite right for me but seemed thoughtful.
AppleScript was just a little weird but I could get my head around it. Shortcuts just doesn’t make sense. Even the simplest things are hard to do and the scripts are totally unmaintainable. I don’t know why Apple is doing this.
I got my first MacOS device, a Macbook Air, recently and was annoyed to find the toggle for 'natural scrolling' is unified between the trackpad and the mouse. I use the macbook docked 90% of the time. So, I asked ChatGPT if there was a way to script toggling the natural scrolling setting. ChatGPT immediately produced a working script and the instructions to create the Shortcut and assign it to a keyboard shortcut. Now I can press Ctrl-Shift-S and toggle natural scrolling.
Even as a programmer, I would have never spent the time necessary to learn the relevant scripting language for this task. I've got other things to do. But ChatGPT knew exactly what to do and now to implement the task, even on the newest version of MacOS.
As an alternative to a script, I can suggest Mos[1], which i've been using for 6 years I think. This is the first app I install on a fresh MacOS because I'm also using my MacBook while it's docked.
There exists free tools that fix that behaviour too (Apple hasn't seemed to care because if you buy a mouse from them, it scrolls with a touch sensor so natural scrolling feels correct. And I do happen to be one of the few people who likes the Magic Mouse)
I felt really smart after I made a fancy Shortcut that did complex playlist generation based on rules and whatnots.
Of course, adding music to a playlist broke a couple of updates down the line and, as far as I'm aware, still doesn't work properly several years later.
(I moved to Marvis Pro[0] because it has reasonably complex smart playlists that just about mimic what I was doing with my generator except they're transient and not saved as mine were. Win some, lose some.)
[0] No link, sorry, because it'd either be iOS App Store or ad-laden bloat sites "reviewing" it. https://www.reddit.com/r/MarvisApp/ might be worth a read though.
This is what prevents me from putting any effort in to shortcuts. I have zero confidence in Apple respecting my time by committing to compatibility or even just not breaking things. The constant feature churn from new PM’s tearing down Chesterton’s fence to make way for their own career ambitions makes Apple user hostile.
Apple doesn’t respect its users with constant changes to iTunes and then Music. My wife is still mad that after redoing her 12,900 songs, and correcting Meta Data, Apple Music said your wrong and changed at least 10% of her music in some way.
I always suspected there's a step in Apple's software design process that goes like this:
- Is the app convenient to use for power users? Then careful, you must have mindlessly went with what's intuitive for you, but what's actually intuitive for normal people is, has to be, different. Go back and find (or invent if you must), the "naturally" intuitive design.
I take it this only supports Apple’s built-in actions, and doesn’t plug into the broader AppIntents system? AppIntents includes a packaging concept, would be cool to see if this could use third-party AppIntents in a similar way to how scientific Python uses C modules for performance critical sections.
There are some things that are only available in Shortcuts because Apple gave the app entitlements to communicate with parts of the system that an AppleScript or other apps can't. Things like setting/getting the Focus Mode, changing some system settings like Airdrop Receiving, Color Filters, Background Sounds etc.
Also some apps export Shortcut actions that can run in-app code: for example my Lunar app has an action that can help fixing arrangement when monitors flip around [1]
It's much easier to implement a struct for a Shortcut, than exporting AppleScript sdef files or creating IPC command-line tools, so a lot of apps take this route for code that needs access to the memory of the running app.
Thank you for the kind words! Love to hear from people that were helped by my work!
That was also my pain point with Lunar, working on a small balcony in a small apartment where the light from the window was constantly changing and the monitor always being way too bright or way too dim.
I broke one of those LG monitor joystick OSD buttons before I got to building Lunar.
Apple designed Shortcuts to look like a shiny toy demo, and it gets awkward fast once you leave the happy path. AppleScript is old, weird, and still wired into a lot of Mac apps, but the moment it trips over something basic like text encoding you can lose an hour digging through forum posts from 2004.
With Hammerspoon, you get Lua and direct macOS APIs, so you can push much further if you don't mind writing more glue code. If you care about serious Mac automation, you'll probably mix them and curse each one for a different reason.
> If you care about serious Mac automation, you'll probably mix them and curse each one for a different reason.
I do. I completely left all of the automation options. I just use Swift and the private macOS APIs. Though, I will admit that there are still some things that Shortcuts can do that I have not found a to hack around in Swift. The difference is likely due to App Intents, which is big lame.
Love this approach of compiling a readable language to a platform-specific format. Same pattern works well for i18n. Write in one language, compile/translate to the target formats automatically.
The developer experience of writing real code instead of clicking through a GUI (Shortcuts app in this case) is always the right bet for power users
From the repo, it signs natively on macOS and falls back to a cloud signing server (shortcut-signing-server). That fallback matters -- without macOS you would have to reverse-engineer Apple signing format yourself, and it changes across iOS versions. The hosted signing server is really what makes the whole cross-platform toolchain viable.
Looks quite cool and I'd like to give a try. What is the main use case for compiling code to shortcuts? I ask because I'm working on a tool[0] that in a way does the opposite.
What you're doing is visual programming. On its own there isn't anything wrong with it. However, specifically with Shortcuts it's not very pleasant for anything complex.
I had a full garden automation running on shortcuts, but it was extreme hard to maintain and improve due to "editor" being so bare bones.
Thanks for sharing. By the editor being bare bones do you mean some missing feature might change your mind about using it, or do you find the text-based editor much more comfortable?
I was talking specifically about Apple Shortcuts. Once you have anything complex, you're going to need code reuse and its a sad story with shortcuts as provided by Apple.
I’m interested to understand how this is different than Jelly; they seem to be similar. Same for Scriptable. I’ve been looking at this to hand over to Claude to build Shortcuts, something which has a terrible development experience.
You can definitely have Claude work with cherri files.
Jelly was a confusing experience for me, with JellyCuts becoming closed source and focusing on advertising, then Open-Jellycore branching out but not actually keeping up with the latest shortcut actions.
Cherri has almost every action you can find in the Shortcuts app, easy to use, and easy to create Shortcuts that can accept input and output so that they can be automated or scripted further.
You’ll have challenges with this too but you can get something by working with the three top labs’ models. Tried on Arena.ai and sent any errors back (in a personal effort to further iOS accessibility, but I digress).
> Why would you spell it like that if you don't want me to pronounce it chéri/sherry?
Because that's a way to spell it without changing the pronounciation in the US. Also, in the extremely unlikely event that it becomes very popular, in the US you can't trademark a dictionary word, it must be something unique.
I built a small app to follow my infant son's feedings and diaper changes. Simply used the shortcuts get content of url to call the API rest endpoints. This is much better !
The biggest problem IMO is the loooooooong animation delay built into every UI interaction. It's so hard to get into a flow state or even maintain a train of thought when you have to wait for everything on the screen to stop sliding, wiggling, wobbling, jiggling, refracting, distorting, and flashing.
I’m guessing you might know already, but just in case you don’t, “reduce motion” in the accessibility settings menu is essential to productivity and sanity.
There needs to be a happy medium. I don't like reduce motion because it amputates many of the spatial arrangement metaphors inherent in the iOS UI.
My biggest problem with authoring shortcuts is that the editor goes out of its way to obliterate context while you're working. Full-screen editors to change a setting lay on top everything else you're working on. Placeholders for variables, which themselves have no actual names. It's a mess.
This does nothing to remove the loooooong animations. Much of the interface still jiggles, wobbles, slides, etc. It just replaces a fraction of those with fade animations that are just as long. It's just a high-latency interface all throughout.
It does seem like the logical automation platform to prepare repeatable tasks that the end user might want to do.
The permissions and secure app integration models are all there, and it’s reasonably stable.
It was always puzzling why there was never an exportable scripting language, just shareable links. I think I ended up sharing screen shots with Claude last time I wanted to troubleshoot something.
While it's not in quite the same product category, a name change might be in order; this is uncomfortably close to CHERI (cf. https://cheri-alliance.org/).
I've just used this extensively to build 200 Shortcuts for my event-based automation app on macOS [0], because some actions you simply can't do without Shortcuts: changing Focus Mode, toggling Accessibility functions like Color Filters, accessing the Private Cloud Compute model etc.
I also wrote about how Claude was able to basically learn the language from scratch and write those fully compilable Shortcuts for me [1] because it was mind boggling to me that an LLM can do that. Curiously, this is becoming more and more normal in my mind.
[0] https://lowtechguys.com/crank
[1] https://alinpanaitiu.com/blog/how-good-is-claude-really/#che...
When you say Claude learned it. That's in the current context window it is able to do that, right? Or is there a more permanent way to make it learn something?
Cool to hear Claude was able to learn it. I was planning on leveraging it in a future version of this project I was hacking on that lets you execute shortcut actions as tools (without creating actual shortcuts): https://tarq.net/posts/action-relay-shortcut-actions-mcp/
are you certain that it wasn't included in the training data?
I saw someone do this awhile ago with a low resource language (I think it might've been Abkhaz?) with seemingly-incredible results, and eventually everyone came to understood that, even though it wasn't officially supported, Abkhaz materials had been in the training data
Well, that’s a domain that has caught my attention so I’ll give this more weight (ltg). I recall novel Mac apps that weren’t quite right for me but seemed thoughtful.
Yeah having this opens up the LLM assisting path to build shortcuts. Which is great! Maintaining them by hand is not
Cool! As a professional programmer few things consistently succeed in making me feel inept like trying to build an Apple Shortcut
AppleScript was just a little weird but I could get my head around it. Shortcuts just doesn’t make sense. Even the simplest things are hard to do and the scripts are totally unmaintainable. I don’t know why Apple is doing this.
I got my first MacOS device, a Macbook Air, recently and was annoyed to find the toggle for 'natural scrolling' is unified between the trackpad and the mouse. I use the macbook docked 90% of the time. So, I asked ChatGPT if there was a way to script toggling the natural scrolling setting. ChatGPT immediately produced a working script and the instructions to create the Shortcut and assign it to a keyboard shortcut. Now I can press Ctrl-Shift-S and toggle natural scrolling.
Even as a programmer, I would have never spent the time necessary to learn the relevant scripting language for this task. I've got other things to do. But ChatGPT knew exactly what to do and now to implement the task, even on the newest version of MacOS.
As an alternative to a script, I can suggest Mos[1], which i've been using for 6 years I think. This is the first app I install on a fresh MacOS because I'm also using my MacBook while it's docked.
[1]: https://github.com/Caldis/Mos
There exists free tools that fix that behaviour too (Apple hasn't seemed to care because if you buy a mouse from them, it scrolls with a touch sensor so natural scrolling feels correct. And I do happen to be one of the few people who likes the Magic Mouse)
I felt really smart after I made a fancy Shortcut that did complex playlist generation based on rules and whatnots.
Of course, adding music to a playlist broke a couple of updates down the line and, as far as I'm aware, still doesn't work properly several years later.
(I moved to Marvis Pro[0] because it has reasonably complex smart playlists that just about mimic what I was doing with my generator except they're transient and not saved as mine were. Win some, lose some.)
[0] No link, sorry, because it'd either be iOS App Store or ad-laden bloat sites "reviewing" it. https://www.reddit.com/r/MarvisApp/ might be worth a read though.
This is what prevents me from putting any effort in to shortcuts. I have zero confidence in Apple respecting my time by committing to compatibility or even just not breaking things. The constant feature churn from new PM’s tearing down Chesterton’s fence to make way for their own career ambitions makes Apple user hostile.
Apple doesn’t respect its users with constant changes to iTunes and then Music. My wife is still mad that after redoing her 12,900 songs, and correcting Meta Data, Apple Music said your wrong and changed at least 10% of her music in some way.
It feels actively hostile to programmers sometimes
I always suspected there's a step in Apple's software design process that goes like this:
- Is the app convenient to use for power users? Then careful, you must have mindlessly went with what's intuitive for you, but what's actually intuitive for normal people is, has to be, different. Go back and find (or invent if you must), the "naturally" intuitive design.
Not just sometimes. Pretty much always.
Oh boy!
Creating/maintaining Shortcuts is such a pain!
Having to do it on a small iPhone screen with a touchscreen keyboard, through a no-code interface...
I want an actual text editor, I want to version things with git...
It feels like with Cherri I'll finally be able to actually do things!
Thanks!
[dead]
Still confused on why there is no social component of this? What is the best place to find examples of actual useful Apple Shortcuts?
This has everything. https://routinehub.co/
A lot of examples from Federico Viticci / MacStories (scroll down past the Automation Academy ad)
https://www.macstories.net/shortcuts/
/r/Shortcuts is your best bet.
Probably Reddit.
Specifically https://www.reddit.com/r/shortcuts/ since it appears to be the last one standing.
I take it this only supports Apple’s built-in actions, and doesn’t plug into the broader AppIntents system? AppIntents includes a packaging concept, would be cool to see if this could use third-party AppIntents in a similar way to how scientific Python uses C modules for performance critical sections.
[dead]
What can you do on a Mac with Shortcuts vs AppleScript vs Hammerspoon?
There are some things that are only available in Shortcuts because Apple gave the app entitlements to communicate with parts of the system that an AppleScript or other apps can't. Things like setting/getting the Focus Mode, changing some system settings like Airdrop Receiving, Color Filters, Background Sounds etc.
Also some apps export Shortcut actions that can run in-app code: for example my Lunar app has an action that can help fixing arrangement when monitors flip around [1]
It's much easier to implement a struct for a Shortcut, than exporting AppleScript sdef files or creating IPC command-line tools, so a lot of apps take this route for code that needs access to the memory of the running app.
[1] https://lunar.fyi/shortcuts#fix-monitor-arrangement
I didn't realize you were the Lunar guy! I freaking love your apps! Thank you for making good and useful software.
Being able to adjust my monitor brightness during the pandemic actively changed my quality of life for the better (I was in a small SF apartment).
Thank you for the kind words! Love to hear from people that were helped by my work!
That was also my pain point with Lunar, working on a small balcony in a small apartment where the light from the window was constantly changing and the monitor always being way too bright or way too dim.
I broke one of those LG monitor joystick OSD buttons before I got to building Lunar.
TIL Lunar... and it solves at least three different problems I have. Looking forward to playing with it when I'm back at my desk tomorrow!
Apple designed Shortcuts to look like a shiny toy demo, and it gets awkward fast once you leave the happy path. AppleScript is old, weird, and still wired into a lot of Mac apps, but the moment it trips over something basic like text encoding you can lose an hour digging through forum posts from 2004.
With Hammerspoon, you get Lua and direct macOS APIs, so you can push much further if you don't mind writing more glue code. If you care about serious Mac automation, you'll probably mix them and curse each one for a different reason.
> Apple designed Shortcuts to look like a shiny toy demo
Apple bought Workflow from DeskConnect (they may have bough the entire company).
> If you care about serious Mac automation, you'll probably mix them and curse each one for a different reason.
I do. I completely left all of the automation options. I just use Swift and the private macOS APIs. Though, I will admit that there are still some things that Shortcuts can do that I have not found a to hack around in Swift. The difference is likely due to App Intents, which is big lame.
Love this approach of compiling a readable language to a platform-specific format. Same pattern works well for i18n. Write in one language, compile/translate to the target formats automatically. The developer experience of writing real code instead of clicking through a GUI (Shortcuts app in this case) is always the right bet for power users
Of course what we need is a native IDE that runs on an iPhone and produces executable scripts…
Could you explain more about how the signing setup works?
(That's what held me back most for spending more effort on shortcuts.)
From the repo, it signs natively on macOS and falls back to a cloud signing server (shortcut-signing-server). That fallback matters -- without macOS you would have to reverse-engineer Apple signing format yourself, and it changes across iOS versions. The hosted signing server is really what makes the whole cross-platform toolchain viable.
The signing server is hosted by https://routinehub.co/
They offer an API if you’d prefer not to manage signing yourself.
I wonder if https://crates.io/crates/apple-codesign is sufficient to codesign these. Apple usually re-uses these sort of things.
Looks quite cool and I'd like to give a try. What is the main use case for compiling code to shortcuts? I ask because I'm working on a tool[0] that in a way does the opposite.
[0] https://breadboards.io
What you're doing is visual programming. On its own there isn't anything wrong with it. However, specifically with Shortcuts it's not very pleasant for anything complex.
I had a full garden automation running on shortcuts, but it was extreme hard to maintain and improve due to "editor" being so bare bones.
Thanks for sharing. By the editor being bare bones do you mean some missing feature might change your mind about using it, or do you find the text-based editor much more comfortable?
I was talking specifically about Apple Shortcuts. Once you have anything complex, you're going to need code reuse and its a sad story with shortcuts as provided by Apple.
I’m interested to understand how this is different than Jelly; they seem to be similar. Same for Scriptable. I’ve been looking at this to hand over to Claude to build Shortcuts, something which has a terrible development experience.
You can definitely have Claude work with cherri files.
Jelly was a confusing experience for me, with JellyCuts becoming closed source and focusing on advertising, then Open-Jellycore branching out but not actually keeping up with the latest shortcut actions.
Cherri has almost every action you can find in the Shortcuts app, easy to use, and easy to create Shortcuts that can accept input and output so that they can be automated or scripted further.
You’ll have challenges with this too but you can get something by working with the three top labs’ models. Tried on Arena.ai and sent any errors back (in a personal effort to further iOS accessibility, but I digress).
Wonderful project, thank you Cherri!
Main difference is language style.
Cherri feels like your writing Go.
Jelly feels like your writing JavaScript / Swift.
> Cherri (pronounced cherry)
Why would you spell it like that if you don't want me to pronounce it chéri/sherry?
> Why would you spell it like that if you don't want me to pronounce it chéri/sherry?
Because that's a way to spell it without changing the pronounciation in the US. Also, in the extremely unlikely event that it becomes very popular, in the US you can't trademark a dictionary word, it must be something unique.
Like Windows?
Apple?
I built a small app to follow my infant son's feedings and diaper changes. Simply used the shortcuts get content of url to call the API rest endpoints. This is much better !
I'm guessing that if Apple can get it right with the next LLM based Siri, generating or editing Shortcuts may get easier anyway.
The biggest problem IMO is the loooooooong animation delay built into every UI interaction. It's so hard to get into a flow state or even maintain a train of thought when you have to wait for everything on the screen to stop sliding, wiggling, wobbling, jiggling, refracting, distorting, and flashing.
I’m guessing you might know already, but just in case you don’t, “reduce motion” in the accessibility settings menu is essential to productivity and sanity.
There needs to be a happy medium. I don't like reduce motion because it amputates many of the spatial arrangement metaphors inherent in the iOS UI.
My biggest problem with authoring shortcuts is that the editor goes out of its way to obliterate context while you're working. Full-screen editors to change a setting lay on top everything else you're working on. Placeholders for variables, which themselves have no actual names. It's a mess.
This does nothing to remove the loooooong animations. Much of the interface still jiggles, wobbles, slides, etc. It just replaces a fraction of those with fade animations that are just as long. It's just a high-latency interface all throughout.
It does seem like the logical automation platform to prepare repeatable tasks that the end user might want to do.
The permissions and secure app integration models are all there, and it’s reasonably stable.
It was always puzzling why there was never an exportable scripting language, just shareable links. I think I ended up sharing screen shots with Claude last time I wanted to troubleshoot something.
This makes me want to spend some time with Codex just to figure out something fun to do with Shortcuts!
Very cool! IMHO Apple Shortcuts will finally get the love they're due in the age of AI.
I wish Apple hadn’t gone with shortcuts. Instead I wish they’d given us a proper sdk for iOS and macOS as a Python module.
Python is so easy to pick up they could have given it a low code drag and drop front end but for us who can code why not a proper language ?
"shortuct"
Apple had the same typo at WWDC 2018: https://devdude.me/blimg/wwdc18Keynote/shortcutsApp.png
whither AppleScript?
Adjacently, does anyone know of a Terraform-like syntax for creating GitHub Actions YML files?
I'm sure the UX would suck, but you could use hcl2json[0] and then transform that to YAML.
[0]: https://github.com/tmccombs/hcl2json
[dead]
typo in title: "Shortuct" instead of "Shortcut" - is this how we're gonna distinguish from llm? /s
Is this vibe coded? The README at least looks very LLM-ish.
It's been around for a long time. It's from well before vibe-coding was a thing. I first saw it ~3 years ago.
oh okay. I had no idea and was lazy to check the commit logs.
While it's not in quite the same product category, a name change might be in order; this is uncomfortably close to CHERI (cf. https://cheri-alliance.org/).
Should we rename fruit as well just in case?