Bring the power of Apple Shortcuts to Obsidian

Chris Chinchilla
Mac O’Clock
Published in
7 min readDec 13, 2023

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I’ve mentioned before that I have been using Obsidian more and more, and from a knowledge management perspective, it’s fantastic, with a plethora of plugins that extend its functionality to connect to many external services. But as a cross-platform Electron application, integration with the host operating system is one of the places it fails. As the underlying data store is a folder of files, some integration is possible there, but Obsidian has minimal awareness of changes that happen.

Actions for Obsidian aims to add a degree of interaction between Apple’s fantastic shortcuts and Obsidian. It’s a start!

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Installation and setup

You need two components to get the actions working with Obsidian. First, add the Actions URI plugin to Obsidian, which handles incoming requests using Apple’s internal callback URL system that allows you to communicate with other installed applications.

The second is the Actions for Obsidian application, which adds the actions to Shortcuts and provides minimal preferences and license management. The app has an onboarding flow, prompting you…

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Chris Chinchilla
Mac O’Clock

Writer, podcaster, and video maker covering technology, the creative process, board and roleplay game development, fiction, and even more.