The Shortcuts app on Mac: a practical beginner’s guide

Shortcuts is already on your Mac, in the Applications folder, and most people never open it. That’s a pity, because the small jobs you repeat every day are exactly what it’s for: cleaning up pasted text, renaming a batch of files, copying the words out of a screenshot. This guide gets you from an empty window to a few shortcuts you’ll actually use, without any programming.

What Shortcuts is

A shortcut is a recipe. Each step is an action, such as Get Clipboard, Resize Image or Send Message, and actions run in order from the top. Most actions take something in and hand something out, so the result of one becomes the input of the next. Think of it as content flowing down the list.

Actions come from macOS itself, from Apple’s apps and from other apps you install that support Shortcuts. Shortcuts can also run AppleScript, JavaScript and shell scripts, so most jobs you once did in Automator or Terminal can live inside one. Shortcuts vs Automator covers when the older app is still the better fit.

The app has three areas worth knowing: Gallery (ready-made shortcuts from Apple), All Shortcuts (your collection) and the editor, where the action list sits on the right.

Start from the Gallery

The Gallery is the fastest way to see what’s possible, and to learn by taking shortcuts apart.

1. Open Shortcuts and click Gallery in the sidebar.
2. Scroll the rows of categories, or click See All to open one. Use the search field in the top-right corner to look for a task, such as “text” or “PDF”.
3. Click a shortcut to read its description. To see its actions first, click the More button, then Done.
4. Click Add Shortcut. If it needs setup, answer the questions and click Add Shortcut again.

It now appears in All Shortcuts. Double-click it to open the editor and see how it’s built. Changing a working shortcut is a gentler start than a blank page.

Build your first shortcut

Here’s a small one that earns its place: text copied from a PDF often arrives with a line break at the end of every line. This shortcut joins those lines back into paragraphs.

1. Click the add button (+) in the toolbar. Click the name at the top and type “Clean Text”.
2. In the action list on the right, search for “clipboard” and double-click Get Clipboard.
3. Search for “replace” and double-click Replace Text.
4. Click the find field and type the pattern below. In the replacement field, type a single space.
5. Click the arrow on Replace Text to show its options, and turn on Regular Expression.
6. Add Copy to Clipboard at the end.
7. Click the run button at the top of the editor to test it.

(?<!\n)\n(?!\n)

That pattern matches a line break that isn’t part of a blank line, so paragraphs stay separate while the lines inside them join up. Copy some broken text, run the shortcut, and paste.

If something goes wrong, put a Quick Look action between two steps. When you run the shortcut, it shows exactly what is being passed along, which makes the faulty step easy to spot.

Ways to run a shortcut

A shortcut is only useful if starting it is quicker than doing the job by hand. These are the options, and most are set in the shortcut’s details (the Shortcut Details button, ⓘ, at the top of the editor):

Spotlight is the one most people overlook. Our Spotlight tips cover quick keys, short strings of letters that jump straight to an action.

Since macOS 26, shortcuts can also run on their own as automations: at a time of day, when a file is saved to a folder, or when a display connects, among other triggers. Click Automation in the sidebar, then the add button, or choose File → New Automation. Pick a trigger, then choose Run Immediately or Run After Confirmation, which asks with a notification first.

Five useful text shortcuts

Each of these takes a minute to build with the steps above. Action names are as they appear in the list.

1. Word count. Get Clipboard → Count set to Words → Show Alert. Handy for forms with a word limit.
2. Date stamp. Format Date on Current Date, with Date Format set to ISO 8601 → Copy to Clipboard. Paste a sortable date into file names and notes.
3. Clean Text. The shortcut you just built.
4. Text from an image. Extract Text from Image → Copy to Clipboard, set up as a Quick Action. Our guide to extracting text with Shortcuts covers it step by step.
5. Translate the clipboard. Get Clipboard → Translate Text → Copy to Clipboard. For translating words inside pictures, see translating an image with Shortcuts.

Shortcuts can also start other apps through their links. Unpixel, a menu bar app that copies text from anything on screen, is one example. A shortcut with a URL action set to unpixel://capture, followed by Open URLs, starts a text capture that you can pin or trigger from Spotlight. Its x-callback-url links go further: Open X-Callback URL with unpixel://x-callback-url/capture waits for the capture and passes the text to the shortcut’s next action. Our page on URL schemes on Mac explains how links like this work.

Share and import

To share a shortcut as a link, open it in the editor, click the Share button and choose Copy iCloud Link, then click Share and paste the link anywhere. Whoever opens it sees a description and a Get Shortcut button.

To share it as a file, select it and choose File → Export. The For menu decides who can run it: Anyone, which sends a copy to Apple for checking, or People Who Know Me, which includes your contact details. To import a .shortcut file, double-click it, or drag it into the Shortcuts window or onto its Dock icon.

Treat shared shortcuts like any other software. Open each one and read its actions before you run it. Shortcuts that include scripts need Allow Running Scripts in Shortcuts → Settings → Advanced. Apple warns that running scripts could cause data loss, so leave it off unless you trust the source.

Quick checklist

• Learn: add from the Gallery, then open the editor to see how it works.
• Build: add button, search the action list, double-click actions in order.
• Test: add Quick Look between steps to see what each one passes on.
• Run faster: a keyboard shortcut, Spotlight or Control Center.
• Share safely: Copy iCloud Link or File → Export, and read others’ actions first.