Live: Creating Your Own Shortcuts For Spotlight

Hi everyone, this is Gary with MacMost.com.
Hang out with me live while I look into using Spotlight with shortcuts in macOS Tahoe.
So the purpose of this live episode is to examine the new feature in Spotlight in macOS Tahoe where you can easily use shortcuts.
So to begin, let's look at Spotlight here.
And when you use Command Space to bring up Spotlight, you've got Spotlight Search, but you also have these buttons here.
And these buttons, the third one is Actions.
And you could just do Command 3 to get there.
So I'll just do Command 3.
And under Actions here, you've got all these different actions you can perform.
And they're really interesting because some of them just do one thing, but others will actually prompt you for input.
Like for instance, if I click on send message here, I have to double click on it.
It asks send what message to, and then I get to choose recipients.
I'll go over here and let's say create note.
And I could say create note with contents in a notes folder.
You get the idea here.
You can create a new event that actually has three inputs here and all of that.
And so you've got a lot of stuff.
Here's like random number and it says random number between, and then you can give two values like five and 45.
And then I can press return and it gives me a random number there.
So these are actions that you can perform in Spotlight.
But what's really cool is you can also tap your own shortcuts here and put them here.
So let's look at how to do that by creating a shortcut.
And I'm going to create like a really simple one first.
So I'm going to go into the shortcuts app here.
I've got a little folder called Spotlight.
examples and I'll click the plus button here to create a new shortcut.
And I'm just going to look up URL and just say open URLs.
And the idea here is that I'm going to open up a web page.
Let's just do macmost.com as an example.
And that's all this does.
If you run it, it opens macmost.com.
We'll call this shortcut go to macmost.com like that.
Now I'm going to go to details section here, clicking on the I button, going to details, and going to make sure that show in spotlight is on.
Now, when I bring up spotlight like this, and I search for go to, and I start looking for go to MacMost, you can see it appears here as a shortcut, and I can activate it.
Actually, I've got two of them, because I had the old one I was testing with, and I can also set quick keys here.
So it says here, add quick keys.
I can add a quick key.
So I can go to MacMost.com.
I can type that out and I can click on it here.
Actually, double click on it here and I'll run the shortcut and it's actually going to open Safari up in my other display.
But that's what it did here.
It opened up Safari here.
And that's really handy.
Anytime I want to go to MacMost.com, I can now type that quick key, mm, and it'll bring that up first, return, we'll launch it.
So I have a really fast way to get to a website.
This doesn't have to be macmost.com, right? I could have done something much more complex here.
Like I could have put a URL in here that's really long, like to a Google doc or a specific part of a website or dashboard that I need to go to.
And then I could set it up as a thing in shortcuts here under actions, but I didn't have to go to actions.
I could have just done it in the regular spotlight search, like the universal search, you know, and MM goes to this.
And I could set this quick keys to whatever it is I want to jump to it.
Really cool and handy.
So let's take a look at some other shortcuts that we can do that will be a little bit more complex.
So I'm going to go here and I'm going to create another one.
And what I'm going to do here is I'm going to, oh yeah, I'm going to do a format date.
So the idea is here, like sometimes you need to type like a date in long form and you don't want to type all that.
So you can have shortcuts format that for you.
So I'm going to look up a format date here and bring that in here and it'll format a date.
And let's go here to the info, details, show in Spotlight.
And I'm going to click receive input from Spotlight.
That's what's going to trigger that little thing where I can type something in Spotlight.
And I can receive and I go to click on receive here.
I'm going to select all and deselect all.
So all these checkboxes are off and just select text.
Receive text from search result.
That's what receive input from Spotlight does.
It gives me from search result here.
And now I can format.
And what I could do here is I could format and I can say the shortcut input and as, and I can choose the format.
Let's do, we can do long date, long time, but I could also have done, you saw that there was custom.
So you can customize how it looks.
Like if I do custom here, you can do a string like that, right? And you can look up how to customize that.
But the idea here is I can input something Let's do format a date.
And I now have this, and then it should work in Spotlight.
Let's bring it up, and I'll do format a date.
And there it is.
That's the one I created.
You can see it's purple.
That was the color it chose.
Let me do FAD, format a date.
And I can double-click on it here.
It'll ask for input.
it.
I'll do 10 31 2025, press return, and I get the date there.
Now, what's the purpose of this? The purpose of this would be to be able to type something in a document.
So I've got my document, there's stuff in here, and I do command space.
Let's go back here to FAD for format to date.
You can see how it assigned the quick keys right there.
So I could change that, but FAD is exactly what I want.
Formatted date, returned, and I'll do 10, 31.
One of the cool things about this is it'll assume the current year, right? So I'll do there.
Now, what would be great is if I could get it to input it right in the document I was working in, but it won't.
However, if I double-click on this, you can see paste.
It shows up there when I click once.
click a second time it pastes it in i don't like that i wish you could just press return and it would input it in but it does work when you bring it up again you see how it's still there return does it so a little buggy like i would love to see them fix that so the first time it pastes instead of now the second time um but i can go and now change this to like uh 10 30 and you can see it changes it there now it still won't do it right so i have to double click there so it's kind of nice it's kind of like a nice little demonstration of how you could have input let's go and do another one um but actually oh no i want to show you one more thing you go in here let's delete here i can do fad i don't have to press return enter in a date i can do space and then i could do say 11 8 and return will actually take that as input so FAD space 11 8 actually gives me this result here it still won't put it in there I gotta double click but you get the idea it's so it's nice to be able to go and give input to shortcuts in that way inside spotlight like that so let's look at another example I'll go back into shortcuts here and I will create another shortcut here for this one we're going to let's see go right to Info, Details, Show in Spotlight, Receive Input from Spotlight.
We'll Select All, Deselect All, and Select Text.
Great.
So now we're all ready to kind of accept input here.
By the way, it says if there's no input, you can do, and you can change it to say, oh, get the clipboard if there's no input, or ask for it, that kind of thing.
I'm not going to mess with that right now, but you do have some options here.
Now, what I'm going to do here is I'm going to look up Note, And I'm going to find append to note, which is nice.
It allows me to append some text to a note.
What's the text? Well, I'll control click or two finger click here.
And I will say the shortcut input is what I want to append.
And to which note? I've got a note called scratch pad.
Let's look in here.
So I just created a note.
Scratch pad's the first line.
I've put some sample text in there.
I want this to append whatever text into the node.
So I'll just do append to scratch pad as the title there.
And I'll close it to hide shortcuts here.
And I'll do command space, but to clear out spotlight, I'll do append to scratch pad.
Let's assign some quick keys.
So ATS, append to scratch pad, ATS, append to scratch pad, space.
And I could type, this is a test.
And I'll press return.
And I can move Spotlight over here.
You can see it did it.
Put it there.
I can do return again.
I can change this text to something else.
And it did it again.
So I can quit notes here.
and just anytime I want to add something to this note, ATS, remember, spell it right, remember to do whatever and add it in.
And then if I go back to this note here, you can see it added it in there.
So that's kind of nice.
It's like a way, it's like what I imagine Quick Notes would have been originally.
They're a little more complex than that, but just adding a line to this is really nice.
Just to take a quick note and add it to the scratch pad.
And later on, I can go in and, you know, copy and paste this somewhere else or whatever.
And we can make it more complex.
Like if you want to log things, let's go in here and let's do the date.
Let's do, get the current date.
We'll format the date.
We'll set it to short date, short time.
And we'll create a block of text that is, and I will control click or right click or two finger click here and say, give me the formatted date.
And shortcuts gets a little formatted date.
Come on, put it in there.
There it is.
Colon, space.
And then I'm going to say insert variable, the shortcut input like that.
And the appended text is no longer going to be the shortcut input, but the text from this.
So now it works the same way, but it's going to put the date and time, colon, space, and then whatever the input is.
So I could get out of this.
I'll do bring up shortcuts again, and I'll do ATS, or ATS, uh, some thing.
And you could see how it did that there.
So it's more of a log now.
It'll actually record the date and time for things like that.
So, yeah, that's a really cool thing.
And you see how you can continue to customize this a lot.
I mean, all sorts of different stuff with the text.
And you could do other shortcuts things.
Like you could ask for input.
You know, you could do choose from list, choose from menu, do all sorts of stuff, and then keep appending there.
But the whole idea is to be able to bring this up in Spotlight and activate it via Spotlight rather than, you know, running it some other way.
Before, we used to have a thing in the menu bar here where you could activate a shortcut.
But now you can do it in Spotlight.
You can still do it in Control Center.
Control Center is kind of what replaced the little menu item up here for doing shortcuts really quickly.
but you can still do it in the uh uh you know control center you could add with edit controls a thing to activate shortcuts but spotlight's kind of the new way to do that and just creating these little quick key combinations and then adding text to it it just makes it so much more powerful um that uh it's really cool let's uh let me show another example here and I'm going to create something in here that's going to allow me to easily search something.
So the idea is here is I want to open a URL and I'll do open URLs and the URL I'm going to open is something that's basically the beginning of a search at Wikipedia.
So like this.
Actually, let's go and make this easier to see.
I'm going to do text here, and I'm going to say, yeah, take this Wikipedia URL here, which ends with search equals.
And at the end, I'm going to insert the variable shortcut input.
The shortcut input here, we're going to do show in Spotlight, receive input from Spotlight.
We'll do this here, we'll select all, deselect all, do text.
And then we will have that come in and put itself after that.
And actually, to be safe, I'm going to do encode.
And there's URL encode.
So I'm going to URL encode the shortcut input.
That means spaces will be converted to, I think, plus signs.
And other special characters will be converted.
And that'll be the way it's usually seen in URL.
So it's going to take whatever the input is, shortcuts, encode it.
Then it's going to add it to the end of this Wikipedia search thing.
How did I get this Wikipedia search thing, by the way? It was right here.
This thing.
I got it because I just went to in Safari to Wikipedia and I did a search like that and here it is.
That's the search for Wikipedia and then it stuck whatever I typed after it.
So let's put the URL here as the URL or the text right here.
So it's going to encode it.
put it into the text, then open up this whole URL.
I'm going to call it Wikipedia search.
And now I can do it.
We can close this.
We don't need this text edit thing anymore.
We don't need notes open anymore.
I can do spotlight search.
Let's move that back here to the middle.
And I could say Wikipedia search, and it will find it here in shortcuts.
I will do WS, or Wikipedia search, WS space, and then I'll type something.
Like, for instance, I'll type solar system, and then I will press return, and it's going to run that, go to Wikipedia search, use that URL, which then results in Wikipedia redirecting to this.
and yeah it's really cool and you know so many websites have this as like a way to search uh i know mac most does and i know like internet movie database is another one so i could do this i'm not going to bother changing the name of wikipedia search but i would probably call this imdb search and then i would change the quick keys to imdb but now it's going to search imdb.com slash find slash question mark to equals.
And now when I run this, I can do WS because the quick keys are still that.
And then space and do that.
And now you can see it does a search.
And I could have searched for an actor.
I could have searched for director, whatever.
And it would have done the search with these titles here so you could do this for lots of different websites and it really creates an interesting uh a quick way to search that's quicker than using you know the various techniques in safari there are quick ways to do it this is marginally a little quicker but most importantly it demonstrates more of what you can do here like this um and you know i want to show one more example, and this is a really interesting one.
I've got a database here in Numbers.
So this is something I've used in a previous tutorial.
Let's go here in Numbers to, I'm trying to remember where I had this, let's see, Open Recents, there it is, Books, it's in the folder called Important Stuff.
And it's a fake list of books, right? Just books and the author name and a fake format, and when I read it, you know, I haven't read most of these books, but you get the idea.
But say this is your collection of books and you've been cataloging it, but this could also be an inventory for a store or, uh, you know, clients list for a freelance artist, you know, whatever it is.
And the idea is I want a quick way to search this and tell me if it found something in there.
So I actually created one, look up my books and I will move this into spotlight examples.
And JavaScript for automation.
JavaScript instead of AppleScript, because you guys know I like JavaScript better than AppleScript, but you could have done this in AppleScript.
And it's got the numbers document here.
There's a full path for it.
And it's going to look in sheet one in the table called My Books.
And it's basically going to use this bit of JavaScript to go through and look for the title and the title in this database here.
So for instance, if I wanted it to find, like if I wanted to type and say, do I have to book Snow Crash? You know, I don't remember.
So I will close and quit numbers here and I will trigger look up my books from this.
Let's quit shortcuts.
And in Spotlight, I will say look up my books.
And you can see I did LMB here.
LMB, look up my books.
crash.
And what it should do, let's see if this works live, is it should open numbers, open that file, and use all that JavaScript to actually look through the list to find that title in the first column and then return some information from the other columns.
I will try that.
It's going to run shortcut and let's see if it works.
It did.
There it goes.
It looked it up and actually it opened up numbers on my second screen, but it did open up numbers.
That's one of the disadvantages to this script.
Let's look up books, you big and run.
And it's going to do the same thing.
And there it goes.
It looks it up and it got stuff from those other columns.
So, you know, you could see it's getting stuff from the author column and the format column there, but it could have done other stuff it's just an example and it's an example of using uh you know some really complex stuff because you know i realized i was showing you some uh simple stuff before but i want to just show you that could be done with some really complex stuff here like this script to look it up and to be honest with you i just wrote the script using chat gpt and I had to go back and forth about a dozen times before I got it right, actually did what I wanted it to do.
But ChatGPT was able to write this JavaScript for me after I gave it enough instruction and honed it to get it working.
And to return all this, then I modified some stuff myself, like what it returns from the result and all that.
And how it tells you that book not found, because that's another thing here, is I want it to be able to LMB for look up my books.
And if I type something else, I want it to run and then tell me you couldn't find that in the list.
Yeah.
Book not found.
There you go.
So, oh, and actually I left a little single quote there.
And so the idea is I can look stuff up really easily in that database.
I can maintain the database and numbers and look it up.
If I wanted to go further, I would probably have it, you know, close this document or quit numbers at the end instead of leaving numbers open.
But, you know, it's just an example.
It's just something to start with to get to, you know, to show how like this can be used stuff.
So, yeah, those are the examples I wanted to show you.
I want to take a minute to look at the comments here and see if anybody had any questions.
Yeah, you could use somebody asked if there's a way to do a shortcut to launch time machine once you connect the drive.
And you don't even you could use this to do it.
So you could, because you have here in shortcuts, see you've got start time machine backup is something you could add here in shortcuts, right? And you could, if you want, you don't even have to do that as spotlight because you could say new automation and then say for the automation and there's one here for external drive.
So I could say when a specific external drive, choose drive, is connected, and then I could have it run that shortcut there.
You see where it's going to actually start the time machine backup.
Let's see.
Somebody said, do I need to download and install JavaScript? No, you don't need to install JavaScript.
JavaScript is something that runs inside of shortcuts.
you're probably thinking of Java.
Java is a whole different thing.
You know, it's like somebody once told me, it's like JavaScript and Java are like hot dog and dog, completely different things, right? So yeah, JavaScript is just a language like AppleScript inside of the shortcuts app that can be triggered.
It's part of shortcuts.
It's nothing external to that.
So yeah, I think this gives some examples of how to do this.
it's really powerful it's frustrating to use to sometimes get things working i have not yet found a way to have more than one input you saw how when i was i did the thing like a not timer but like calendar i can do calendar i can do add to calendar uh that actually it was add new calendar calendar event right new event and oh that's not what i want new event right there new event and i was showing you the messages one look add title from a start time to a stop time it's like three different things it's prompting for i have not found a way to get shortcuts to do that it seems to just take one thing but you could always have like comma separate stuff there's a split action where you can split text so you could always have like three things that you feed in something comma something comma something and then you split text and shortcuts to break it apart so there are ways to get around that you can also have shortcuts prompt you for things so you can have it accept the text and then maybe prompt you for the note if you wanted to so there's a lot of cool stuff that you could do um i do like that i don't need to fill up a menu item here anymore with like a hundred different shortcuts i can just trigger them by shortcuts.
I can have text to input.
You could even have a shortcut that runs shortcuts, you know, so you could have like a shortcut that basically, you know, you do plus and you could do a, you know, choose from menu and have it prompt for like different menu items.
And you could have that trigger with shortcuts and each one of these can be like run shortcut.
So if you choose one, it runs one shortcut.
If you choose two, it runs a second shortcut.
But obviously you would not call these one or two, you would call them the things you wanted.
So you could have it say trigger one of five actions with a menu item here.
You can even have it do stuff like, you know, you could get, I'm not going to do it here, it's going to take too long, but you could have a shortcut that actually looks inside of a folder like the spotlight examples folder or the action button or the AI examples folder.
I've got these folders here and it'll return all the shortcuts in there and feed that to a menu.
So then you could have a shortcut that you trigger in Spotlight that then looks in a folder in the shortcuts app, gives you a list of the shortcuts that are there and then let you pick one to trigger.
So stuff like that could be really handy to have.
So, you know, play around with it, start playing around with it and see what you can do or you don't have to go that far.
You can just use it to just trigger a shortcut you've already got that doesn't have any input that just goes to a webpage.
Like that first one I showed you to go to macmos.com.
You could just create like seven of those to go to your seven most common websites, put two little quick keys to call on them like this and then you can go.
By the way, you see how MM doesn't bring up this one anymore? If you go to command 3, it should.
Let's go to MacMost.
Shortcuts.
Oh, I didn't add the quickies here.
Let's do it again.
Go to MacMost.com.
Go to MacMost.
Oh, it added GTMM.
I could change those.
But the idea is, you get the idea.
You could just create a bunch of those that are two or three letters, trigger them easily in shortcuts, and have a quick way to get to your favorite websites, and just keep it simple like that if you don't want to get into more complex things.
Anyway, I've gone on long enough about this kind of stuff, and thanks to everybody that watched.
And of course, I'll make this video stay up, and I will post it tomorrow morning at macmost.com and kind of an enhanced version, I can do that because I record as well as stream live.
So you can look for that at the MacMost site tomorrow there.
And yeah, I appreciate everybody watching.
Thanks.
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