How to trigger Apple Shortcuts from a radial menu on your Mac

Apple Shortcuts is the best piece of automation software Apple has ever shipped. It's also one of the most awkward to actually use. You build a shortcut, and then you have to either dig through the menu bar icon every time, run it from Spotlight by typing its full name, or burn a global hotkey on it.

Global hotkeys are fine for the two shortcuts you run ten times a day. They fall apart the moment you have twenty shortcuts and four fingers.

A radial menu solves this. You hold one trigger, flick toward the shortcut you want, release, and it runs. No typing. No menu bar digging. No memorizing ⌃⌥⇧F7.

Why a radial menu fits Shortcuts specifically

Shortcuts tend to cluster by context. You have a handful for meetings, a handful for writing, a handful for file cleanup, a handful for home automation. They don't need to be globally accessible — they need to be contextually accessible.

A radial menu maps onto that shape perfectly. One trigger, one flick, and the physical direction of the flick becomes your muscle memory for each shortcut. North-west is "start focus timer." East is "clean up Desktop." South is "mute all notifications." Your hand learns it in a day.

And because a radial menu is spatial, it scales past the twelve-item wall that kills most pie menu apps. Sub-menus let you group related shortcuts under a parent wedge — "Meetings" opens a second ring with "Start Zoom," "Mute notifications," "Set Slack status," "Start recording."

The basic setup

You need two things: a shortcut that actually works from the command line, and a launcher that can call it. macOS ships with a command-line tool for Shortcuts built in — /usr/bin/shortcuts. From a terminal, this works:

shortcuts run "My Shortcut Name"

That's the whole mechanism. Any macOS app launcher that can execute a shell command can run a shortcut. The difference between launchers is how quickly and how cleanly they let you map that command to a gesture.

Wiring a shortcut to a Swik wedge

In Swik, the flow looks like this:

1. Open Swik's settings and pick the profile you want to add the shortcut to.
2. Drag a wedge into place or click an empty slot.
3. Choose Run Shortcut as the action and type the exact name of the shortcut from Shortcuts.app.
4. Save. The shortcut now runs whenever you flick toward that wedge.

Names are case-sensitive and need to match exactly, so if your shortcut is called Start Focus Session in Shortcuts.app, that's what goes in the wedge. If it's a shortcut with emoji in the name, include the emoji.

Grouping shortcuts into sub-menus

If you've ever built more than twelve shortcuts, you know the limit of a flat pie menu. Wedges get too narrow and your flicks become imprecise.

The answer is nesting. Instead of exposing every shortcut at the top level, group them by context. A single outer wedge called "Meetings" can open a secondary ring with five meeting-related shortcuts. Another called "Writing" can open its own set. You end up with six or seven outer wedges — each a category — and twenty-plus shortcuts are one flick away without any ambiguity.

This is also where pie menus beat every text launcher for automations you run but don't remember the name of. You don't have to recall "was it 'Start focus' or 'Focus start'?" — you just flick toward the direction you've flicked a hundred times before.

A realistic setup

Here's what a working Shortcuts-heavy radial menu profile might look like for someone who works from home:

Eight top-level wedges, three sub-menus, and roughly twenty distinct shortcuts reachable in one or two flicks. You'd need to burn eight hotkeys and have three sub-rows of more to do the same thing with global shortcuts alone.

A few things to know

Shortcuts that ask for input will still prompt you. If a shortcut has a "Ask Each Time" variable, triggering it from a radial menu doesn't bypass that — you'll still get the dialog. Build your shortcuts to take their inputs from the frontmost app or from context if you want them to run silently.

Shortcuts that take a few seconds don't block the menu. Swik fires and forgets; the shortcut runs in the background. You can flick, dismiss the menu, and keep typing.

You can chain macros. Because each wedge is just running shortcuts run, you can point multiple wedges at shortcuts that themselves call other shortcuts. The composition is fully Apple's — Swik is just the trigger surface.