Shortcut actions

In a Shortcut action, PopClip will invoke a macOS Shortcut by name.

Availability

Shortcuts are only available on macOS 12.0 and above. On earlier versions of macOS, any shortcut actions defined in an extension will not appear in the PopClip bar.

Properties

A shortcut action is defined by the presence of a shortcut name field, as follows:

Key	Type	Description
shortcut name	String	The name of the macOS Shortcut to call. This must exactly match its name in the Shortcuts app.

Input and output

The selected plain text will be sent as input to the shortcut. Any plain text returned by the shortcut will be available to the after step.

Example

The following example snippet defines an extension with a single shortcut action that calls a shortcut called My Shortcut Name:

#popclip shortcut example
name: Run My Shortcut
shortcut name: My Shortcut Name

Running a shortcut from JavaScript

For anything beyond "send the selection, paste what comes back" — choosing the shortcut based on the text, passing something other than the selection, or doing more with the result — use popclip.runShortcut() from a JavaScript action instead. It takes the same shortcut name and resolves with the shortcut's output.

// #popclip shortcut js example
// name: Summarize
// language: javascript
// after: show-result
const summary = await popclip.runShortcut("Summarize Text", {
  input: popclip.input.text,
});
return summary;

An extension can only invoke shortcuts the user has built and installed themselves. A name that is not in the user's library rejects with an error.