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Cherri – programming language that compiles to an Apple Shortuct

github.com

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Re: Cherri – programming language that compiles to an Apple Shortuct

#11

Post by alin23 »

threecheese wrote: post #2

I’m interested to understand how this is different than Jelly; they seem to be similar. Same for Scriptable. I’ve been looking at this to hand over to Claude to build Shortcuts, something which has a terrible development experience.

You can definitely have Claude work with cherri files.

Jelly was a confusing experience for me, with JellyCuts becoming closed source and focusing on advertising, then Open-Jellycore branching out but not actually keeping up with the latest shortcut actions.

Cherri has almost every action you can find in the Shortcuts app, easy to use, and easy to create Shortcuts that can accept input and output so that they can be automated or scripted further.

Re: Cherri – programming language that compiles to an Apple Shortuct

#14

Post by mmastrac »

yg1112 wrote: post #6
hmartin wrote: post #4

Could you explain more about how the signing setup works? (That's what held me back most for spending more effort on shortcuts.)

From the repo, it signs natively on macOS and falls back to a cloud signing server (shortcut-signing-server). That fallback matters -- without macOS you would have to reverse-engineer Apple signing format yourself, and it changes across iOS versions. The hosted signing server is really what makes the whole cross-platform toolchain viable.

I wonder if https://crates.io/crates/apple-codesign is sufficient to codesign these. Apple usually re-uses these sort of things.

Re: Cherri – programming language that compiles to an Apple Shortuct

#19

Post by alin23 »

kbd wrote: post #16

What can you do on a Mac with Shortcuts vs AppleScript vs Hammerspoon?

There are some things that are only available in Shortcuts because Apple gave the app entitlements to communicate with parts of the system that an AppleScript or other apps can't. Things like setting/getting the Focus Mode, changing some system settings like Airdrop Receiving, Color Filters, Background Sounds etc.

Also some apps export Shortcut actions that can run in-app code: for example my Lunar app has an action that can help fixing arrangement when monitors flip around [1]

It's much easier to implement a struct for a Shortcut, than exporting AppleScript sdef files or creating IPC command-line tools, so a lot of apps take this route for code that needs access to the memory of the running app.

[1] https://lunar.fyi/shortcuts#fix-monitor-arrangement

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