If you’re looking for ways to write more efficiently, Apple’s Shortcuts app is worth exploring. By combining actions from different apps into custom workflows, it helps automate routine tasks and save time. You can run shortcuts from your iPhone or iPad’s Home Screen, your Mac’s menu bar, or even with a simple Siri command. In this guide, you’ll learn how to create shortcuts that work seamlessly with Ulysses.

The Shortcuts App

Each shortcut in Apple’s Shortcuts app is made up of a series of actions. The app includes a Gallery where you can explore a wide range of pre-built shortcuts for different tasks.

If you find a shortcut in the Gallery that looks helpful, you can easily tweak it to fit your needs. For Ulysses, there are currently two shortcuts you can find by searching the Gallery:

• “Append to Ulysses Sheet”: Takes the text from your clipboard and adds it to the end of a selected Ulysses sheet.
• “Attach Note to Ulysses Sheet”: Takes text or images from your clipboard and adds them as note attachments to a chosen sheet.

One of the best things about Shortcuts is that you’re not limited to what’s already available. In the “All Shortcuts” view, you can create your own shortcuts tailored to the actions you perform on your device. By combining actions from different apps, you can turn several steps into a single sequence. When building your own shortcut, simply search for Ulysses in the action list.

The possibilities are endless, and you can create shortcuts that match your workflow. To help you get started, we’ll walk through creating a basic shortcut together.

Create a Shortcut

Let’s say you keep a diary in Ulysses and answer the same set of questions every day. Your diary is stored in a Ulysses group, and each day you create a new sheet inside that group. At the top of every entry, you want to automatically include the current date and your location.

Your new shortcut will handle the following steps for you:

• When you run it, the shortcut opens Ulysses and navigates to your diary group.
• It creates a new sheet in that group, with the current date, your location, and your chosen questions already filled in.

On Mac

1. Open the “All Shortcuts” view in the Shortcuts app, and click the + button.

2. On the right side of the screen, you will see a list of suggested actions. Click the search box to browse the available actions per app or enter a search term. For more information about each action, hover over the it and tap the info button on the right.

3. Now double-click or drag an action to add it to your shortcut. In the Shortcuts editor, you can customize each action and rearrange them using drag and drop. For this example, add the following actions in this order:
   • Date: Passes a specified date and time to the next action. Set this to Current Date.
   • Get Current Location: Retrieves the device’s current location.
   • Text: Passes custom input to the next action. Click inside the Text action, then right-click and select “Insert Variable.” Add both Date and Current Location. Click each variable to adjust the level of detail. Then, enter the questions you want to use as prompts for your diary. You can also add markup tags to the text field.
   • Create Sheet: Creates a new sheet in Ulysses. To set it up, right-click the Text variable, go to Insert Variable and choose the Text action as the input (screenshot on the left), then click the arrow next to the Text variable and select the group where you want the new sheet to be saved (screenshot on the right).

4. To test your new shortcut, click the ▶︎ button at the top of the Shortcuts editor.

5. In Ulysses, the newly created sheet will look similar to this.

On iPhone or iPad

Creating a shortcut on your iPhone or iPad is very similar to Mac. 

1. Open the Shortcuts app, choose “All Shortcuts,” and then tap the + button.

2. Now you can browse the available actions or enter a specific search term into the search field.

3. Tap an action to add it to your shortcut. To rearrange it, touch and hold the action and move it the editor.

Shortcut Settings

Now it’s time to get your shortcut ready for everyday use. In the top-left corner, you can give your shortcut a name. For example, we’ve named ours “Daily Diary.” To customize the icon, simply click the current one.

Click or tap the Information icon in the right sidebar to open the configuration options. These settings apply across all platforms, no matter which device you’re using, and any changes you make will sync automatically. Here, you can adjust setup and privacy settings or edit additional details. For instance, you can assign a keyboard shortcut under Details.

The options you choose depend on what your shortcut does and how you prefer to work. The “Show in Share Sheet” option is only needed if you want to run the shortcut from within another app.

You can also run shortcuts using Siri. If Siri is enabled, just say the name of your shortcut, for example, “Hey Siri, Daily Notes.”

For more information, refer to Apple’s Shortcuts User Guide for iPhone, iPad, and Mac.