Shortcuts - Tips on naming, glyph and color use requested

Shortcuts
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Hi guys,

I’ve been really bad at just not being consistant about naming of shortcuts/workflows, glyph use and choice of color. Now my shortcut library is growing at a fast pace and I have concluded that I need to make it easier to get an overview of it’s contents

How do you guys do? Would anyone mind sharing some tips into how you maintain just some sanity in your Shortcuts library?

Any insights would be most useful :slight_smile:

Sincerely, Michael

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See How do you organize your Workflow workflows? for some approaches

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Hi @mbkjeldsen,

I’m in the same boat as you and am slowly working through all 200 or so Shortcuts to colour code and update the glphs etc.
Something that may be useful, which I’m also doing, is for you to ‘tag’ your Shortcuts. If you add a ‘Comment’ step to your Shortcut and then add something like #Automation you can then search for grouped / similarly tagged Shortcuts via … another Shortcut. Here’s a Shortcut that can search for your tags.

I found that tag searching Shortcut elsewhere, but I can’t recall where now to give credit unfortunately. I would imagine it was either from Matt or Viticci.

Enjoy.

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Thanks :blush:

I have indeed been looking into tagging and had hoped that Apple would have solved it in Shortcuts. I just still prefer to also order my stuff in some logic order.

1 Like
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I’m colour-coding things here a bit, leaving red for just two or three instant-action type shortcuts, and the rest either kinda-sorta tie in with the personal colour coding I’ve been using for years, or if the shortcut targets an app I’ll vaguely relate to the app colour. The best tip I have to share is to use the last three colours (grey, pewter, brown – does anybody have a list of the official names?) for respectively, reference/examples, components (i.e. shortcuts invoked by other shortcuts, given a jigsaw glyph), and work in progress, and none of these are set to show in the widget.

I like the tagging idea but I’ll leave that to you power-users, it’s probably overkill for my needs (≅50 shortcuts, but growing).

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I’m also grouping by colour, approximately in the same order as the palette. It seemed the easy way. But overall I don’t get hung up on getting it just right, vaguely in the ball-park is good enough.

I do wish though that it was easier to drag-n-drop within the app. It’s much easier via the widget, thanks to @Murk1e’s post.

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While I’m here, another tip for avoiding the tedious business of moving a new shortcut from the bottom of the list is to start creating a new shortcut by duplicating an existing one which is already in the position you want the new one. This works nicely for those of us who group by function and/or colour.