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