The blog posts go into detail on everything, and have code that is copy-friendly for pasting into your own automation build. I can write up a companion post on that one if there’s any interest. To explore the Automator User Guide, click Table of Contents at the top of the page, or enter. Your workflows automatically become a collection of shortcuts ready to run, saving you time and making Shortcuts exceptionally useful right away. You can easily import Automator workflows into Shortcuts. I also built a variant of the Prepend automation to display a list of filenames so I can prepend various plain-text files from one Service. Use Automator workflows with the Shortcuts app. My main journal log Service is set up to dynamically use the current date as part of the filename, creating a new file if necessary. From the Library, select Mail > New Mail Message and drag it into the workflow.Choose Application for the type of workflow.Launch Automator and create a new document. I invoke the keyboard shortcut, a text prompt window appears ready for text entry, I type in my text, then hit Function+Return keys (to click the ‘OK’ button via keyboard). I built these primarily to capture short text snippets for appending my daily recap journals. They are saved as Services so they can have keyboard shortcuts assigned to them and invoked on the fly, while working in any app.

These use Automator, AppleScript and shell scripts. Thought I would share some automations I developed on macOS for quickly appending and prepending plain-text files.

Mass change date with automator mac