My Fitness focus has a four-shortcut widget that points to a Shortcuts folder containing an “Open Overcast” shortcut. I’m doing it this way so I can have larger buttons to press while I’m on my bike.
I’d like to have this Overcast shortcut in another widget, in another focus mode. It appears a shortcut can only be in one folder at a time. (I dragged it to another folder and it just moved it.) I was hoping Shortcuts folders were more like playlists, were the same song could be in multiple playlists. Do I just need to duplicate the shortcut for the other folder, or is there another way?
This seems risky with more complex shortcuts, because if you made an edit to a shortcut in one folder, you’d have to remember to do the same edit in all of its duplicates. Am I missing something?
Shortcuts folders are like standard folders in other apps not tags or smart folders - so shortcuts will appear in that one folder and the all shortcuts collection.
You could follow the file paradigm and set up an alias in a different folder. Create a new shortcut and add a run shortcut action to it. Set that action to point to your original action. This let’s you have a single source, but also have triggering shortcuts appear in multiple folders.
I did actually lobby the Workflow guys relatively early on to use tags not folders for organisatiom, and even wrote about the reasons behind it back then - Say No to Folders in Workflow. Folders were a second place option and were a very very long time coming, but at least we eventually got something.
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Thanks for the alternate approach.
It’s interesting that even though Shortcuts folders are like Finder folders in some ways, you can’t have two Shortcuts with the same name in different folders. So, I had to give my new run shortcut item a slightly different name, even though its effect is the same.
I guess the “All shortcuts” smart folder would be a little confusing.
The name is unique to avoid ambiguity when calling by name from another shortcut, a URL by name, or the command line. Otherwise, like files, you would need a qualified path name instead of just a name, and that could change and break these triggers if you moved a shortcut between folders. Enforcing unique names is just a simpler approach.