Changes to the Shortcuts App in Tahoe

peavine · June 12, 2025, 1:25pm

The macmost site contains an interesting video on macOS Tahoe (here), and it includes a discussion of the new automation feature of the Shortcuts app. To view existing or create new automations, you simply click on Automation in the sidebar. Some of the automation triggers are time of day, alarm stopped, email or message received from a person, Wi-Fi network joined, a particular app opened or closed, sleep mode enabled, external drive connected, a file added to a particular folder (my favorite), and a particular file modified. The following is a screenshot from the macmost review:

BTW, the macmost policies page allows posting its videos on other sites, so I assume a screenshot with a link to the original video is OK.

evilpants · June 14, 2025, 11:30am

Forgive what might be a silly question, but does anyone know if these changes mean we will be able to do more stuff with AppleScript? Or is this only for shortcuts?

peavine · June 14, 2025, 1:40pm

I don’t have macOS Tahoe installed on my computer, but I’ve watched a lot of videos, and there appear to be three significant changes that pertain to to the Shortcuts app. They are automation; running a shortcut by way of Spotlight; and shortcut actions that implement Apple Intelligence. As you are probably aware, you can run an AppleScript by way of a shortcut, but otherwise none of these changes would appear applicable to AppleScripts. Hopefully, someone who has installed Tahoe will provide some first-hand information.

BTW, an article on the Apple Insider site (here) indicates that the AI actions in the first developer beta are as shown below. It would seem likely that additional actions will be made available in later betas.

Change the tone of text
Make list from text
Make table from text
Proofread text
Rewrite text
Summarize text

fuzzywan · June 15, 2025, 7:44am

Doesn’t sound like any substantive changes in controlling apps, just access to the AI stuff, though the automation triggers coming over from iOS are certainly welcome.

Shortcuts is still a far cry from AppleScript, and it doesn’t help that they run verrrrry slowly on my Mac Studio. That seems to be an issue with my user profile (migrated from Intel), since they run OK with a fresh user account. But I really don’t wanna go through setting everything up from scratch.

Maybe I’ll figure out where the problem is by the time they replace Shortcuts with something else…

peavine · June 16, 2025, 3:33pm

I would generally agree that AppleScript has better support for apps, although there are notable exceptions like the Maps app and System Settings. However, this is only a temporary advantage, because Apple is actively adding new features and actions to the Shortcuts app, while letting AppleScript die a slow death by neglect. More importantly for me, basic AppleScript is unable or only has a limited ability to perform simple tasks like manipulating PDF files; recursively getting files of a particular type from a large folder; getting text with OCR; matching text with regular expressions; calculating and formatting the result of number operations; filtering and sorting various objects; utilizing a JSON; and much more. When it comes to performing useful work, the Shortcuts app is easily the match of AppleScript, IMO.

peavine · September 4, 2025, 2:20pm

I installed Public Beta 6 of macOS Tahoe yesterday and thought I would add a few comments concerning changes to the Shortcuts app.

The most important change for me is Shortcuts automation. In limited testing, this seems to work well, and there are many useful triggers:

The time of day, alarm stopped, email received from a person, files added to a specified folder, a file modified, external drive connected, Wi-Fi network joined, bluetooth device connected, display connected, Stage Manager turned on, specified app opened or closed, and Do Not Disturb turned on.

I also like the ability of Spotlight Search to run shortcuts by way of Quick Keys. Unfortunately, some shortcuts that run fine by other means report an error when run by way of Spotlight Search. Anyways, this is an important new feature, and it will take some time to learn how best to use it.

One small disappointment is that the Shortcuts menu in the menu bar is now a pop-up instead of a drop-down window. I’m sure I’ll get used to this, and I may use Spotlight Search Quick Keys instead.

I had hoped there would be new shortcut actions for specific apps (like Mail) but that’s not the case. Also, several actions that didn’t work as expected in Sequoia haven’t been fixed.

Fortunately, the public beta doesn’t appear to have broken anything significant. Also, I don’t dislike Liquid Glass as much as I thought I would, and I may keep it with the default settings.

BTW, the following is from the Apple press release, and I’m a bit mystified what they are referrning to. You can run menu commmands of supported apps from Quick Search, but I can’t see how that’s of much use. I guess I’ll learn more as I work with this.

Users can also run shortcuts and perform actions from the menu bar in the app they’re currently working in, all without lifting their hands off the keyboard.

leo_r · September 4, 2025, 3:09pm

It’s similar to the already existing option to invoke the desired menu via the Help search field in the active app.

The only difference is that it simply didn’t work for me from the new Spotlight (clicking the found menu didn’t do anything in InDesign). The Help menu way does work as usual.

peavine · September 4, 2025, 3:33pm

Thanks Leo. I wasn’t aware of the Help search field.

I seem to recall that this feature had to be supported by the specific app, but I could be wrong about that. An example using Safari, where I just opened Quick Search and typed open.

EDIT. I tested with the FSNotes and Soulver 2 apps, and Quick Search showed and employed menu items for both apps. So apparently this should work with most apps.

leo_r · September 4, 2025, 7:20pm

I see, interesting… I only tried InDesign so I guess it depends on the app indeed.

peavine · September 5, 2025, 3:55pm

The shortcut dialogs in Tahoe are changed in several respects–most noticeably in that they no longer show the name of the shortcut.

peavine · September 6, 2025, 4:25pm

FWIW, I thought I’d give a simple example of the Shortcuts app’s new automation feature. When first opened, a few apps always seem to be on the left side of my screen, and this automation changes the position and size of Script Editor. There’s another dialog not shown in the screenshot where you select the shortcut to run.

It’s a nice convenience to have all automations immediately at hand in the Shortcuts app:

peavine · September 13, 2025, 4:07pm

I’m not sure if this is new to Tahoe, but you can now add individual shortcuts to the menu bar. This is done by way of the macOS Tahoe Command Center by selecting Shortcuts from the sidebar.

peavine · October 5, 2025, 2:59pm

I’ve been using macOS Tahoe for some time now, and my favorite new feature is the ability to run shortcuts by way of Spotlight search. I mention this because doing this pretty much requires that you give the Spotlight app (which is at /System/Library/CoreServices/Spotlight.app) both Accessibility and Full Disk Access permissions. If you don’t do this, some shortcuts when run by way of Spotlight search will fail either with or without an error message.

peavine · October 12, 2025, 2:49pm

A thread in the AppleScript forum (here) contains AppleScripts that get Spotlight Quick Keys and the corresponding shortcuts. I’ve included below a shortcut that does pretty much the same thing.

Quick Keys.shortcut (25.0 KB)

BTW, if I use Spotlight to search for and run a shortcut, and if the shortcut doesn’t already have Quick Keys assigned, Spotlight will automatically add Quick Keys based on the first letter of some words of the shortcut name. So, for example, a shortcut named Copy to External Drive and Overwrite will have the Quick Keys cedo. I did a Google search but couldn’t find how to stop this from happening.

peavine · October 15, 2025, 1:30pm

FWIW, if a shortcut is run by way of Spotlight, a notification is placed in the menu bar (see screenshot below). In some circumstances, the notification may remain after the shortcut is finished. I mainly notice this when the shortcut contains an alert dialog, which is cancelled by the user. These notifications can be dismissed individually or removed in bulk by rebooting the computer. I assume this is a bug, as I can’t see any use for the notifications other then as a notification.

peavine · October 22, 2025, 2:57pm

I installed macOS 26.1 public beta 4 and thought I’d report on the status of bug fixes in the Shortcuts app. This is after 4 or 5 days of use.

Editing text in a Comment action was often not possible, because the cursor would frequently jump to the end of the text and typed characters would simply disappear. I have not encountered this issue since updating.
Dragging a new action into a lengthy shortcut would often cause the Shortcuts app to quit with an error. This no longer occurs with my test shortcuts.
A shortcut-is-running notification would occasionally remain in the menu bar when the shortcut is run by way of Spotlight. With rare exception, I have not encountered this issue since updating.
Running a shortcut on a current selection (e.g. a Shortcuts app folder) by way of Spotlight did not always show the current selection but instead showed the prior selection or nothing at all. This has not been fixed.
Running a shortcut on selected text by way of Spotlight caused blank lines between the selected text to be removed. Also, lines of selected text were occasionally merged. In testing with TextEdit, this has not been fixed.
Running a shortcut on a current selection or selected text by way of Spotlight did not immediately show the current selection or selected text but but did show the current selection or selected text after 5 seconds or so. This has not been fixed.

In my testing, significant unresolved issues all have to do with running a shortcut on a selection with Spotlight, and an easy workaround is to instead use a Quick Action or Service.

peavine · October 29, 2025, 2:10pm

Yesterday I installed macOS 26.1 Release Candidate 1, and everything having to do with the Current Selection feature in Spotlight still seems broken. I thought I might not understand the purpose or operation of the Current Selection feature, but my understanding and Google AI’s understanding are the same (for what that’s worth). I normally don’t post copies of Google AI, but in this case it does a good job of summarizing the use of the Current Selection feature.

On a positive note, the Shortcuts app in macOS 26.1 otherwise seems to work well, and running a shortcut on a Current Selection can be done with a Quick Action.

peavine · November 12, 2025, 9:19pm

This is a minor edit of my Quick Keys shortcut included above. I fixed one issue and the new shortcut is marginally faster. I wasn’t able to edit the earlier post that contained this shortcut.

Quick Keys.shortcut (24.9 KB)

peavine · November 19, 2025, 12:48pm

I installed macOS 26.2 Public Beta 3, and the issues noted below are the only ones in my testing that have not been resolved. So, little by little things are being fixed.

Running a shortcut on a current selection (e.g. a Shortcuts app folder) by way of Spotlight did not always show the current selection but instead showed the prior selection or nothing at all.
Running a shortcut on selected text by way of Spotlight caused blank lines between the selected text to be removed. Also, lines of selected text were occasionally merged. Perhaps this is intended behavior.
An automation involving an email does nothing.

peavine · December 21, 2025, 1:34pm

I installed macOS 26.3 Public Beta 1, and the issues noted below are the only ones in my testing that have not been resolved. Fortunately, except as noted below, running a shortcut on a current selection by way of Spotlight does appear to work correctly now.

Running a shortcut on selected text by way of Spotlight causes blank lines between the selected text to be removed. This may be intended behavior.
An automation involving an email does nothing.

I also encountered an odd issue which is documented below. I don’t know if this is a new or existing issue, or perhaps I’m doing something wrong. It’s not something that would be encountered often, so I note it FWIW.

Stop and Output Test.shortcut (21.6 KB)