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Using macOS Shortcuts with an Alfred workflow

When Apple's Shortcuts was released on macOS Monterey, our community started asking for ways to run shortcuts from Alfred. You’re so passionate about automation that you want to automate your automations, and we love that!

So we created a Workflow for running shortcuts.

To list all your installed shortcuts, open Alfred and type sc. You'll need to download the linked Shortcuts actions below to use them.

List shortcuts with sc

If you're hyper-organised, you may have your shortcuts separated in folders. scd reveals those.

List shortcut folders with scd

There are three main ways to run shortcuts:

Just Run it

Newest Short of the Week is as simple as it gets. Run it with ↵ and it opens the latest post on the Short of The Week website. Great when you're looking for something quick to watch on a break.

Choosing Newest Short of the Week shortcut

Newest Short of the Week shortcut layout

Pass Files to it

Upload to Imgur does what it says on the tin: Select one or more images, press your Universal Actions hotkey and run the shortcut to upload your images. You'll get a notification and the links will automatically be copied to your clipboard.

File Action to run shortcuts

Choosing Upload to Imgur shortcut

Upload to Imgur shortcut layout

Give it an Argument

Calm Notifications controls Do Not Disturb. It needs an argument of on, off, or a number (enables Do Not Disturb for that number of minutes).

To give an argument to a shortcut, action it with ⌘↵. Alternatively, select text anywhere and press your Universal Actions hotkey - it works like passing a file.

Choosing Calm Notifications shortcut via sc, with an argument

Giving argument to Calm Notifications shortcut

Calm Notifications shortcut layout

Adding arguments to your shortcuts is a powerful way to integrate them with Workflows. CalmNotifications is also a Workflow which seamlessly runs the above shortcut and uses other Alfred features to give feedback on the current state of Do Not Disturb.

Be sure to check John Voorhees's rundown of the Shortcuts Workflow at MacStories for more examples.

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