Car­lo Zottmann should already be famil­iar to the read­ers of this blog, since I’ve men­tioned his apps—which expand the fea­tures of Apple Shortcuts—several times before. I use short­cuts cre­at­ed with Actions for Obsid­i­an and Brows­er Actions every day, and I wouldn’t want to be with­out these lit­tle helpers any­more.

How­ev­er, one prob­lem is becom­ing more and more obvi­ous with the grow­ing num­ber of short­cuts, espe­cial­ly on macOS: Access on the Mac is not solved opti­mal­ly. The share menu requires too many clicks, and pin­ning to the menu bar, which I pre­fer, is also not ide­al. The num­ber of pos­si­ble entries is lim­it­ed, there’s no way to orga­nize them, and – even worse – all short­cuts are always shown, no mat­ter if they make sense in the cur­rent work con­text or not.

These prob­lems have appar­ent­ly also caught Carlo’s atten­tion. A few weeks ago, he announced a beta pro­gram for his new app, Bar­Cuts. This time, the app’s main focus wasn’t on offer­ing actions for automat­ing browsers or Obsid­i­an, but on solv­ing the issues of quick and con­text-based access to short­cuts. No ques­tion, I joined the beta pro­gram right away. By now, the beta phase is over; ver­sion 2025.2.0 was just released. So, it’s about time to write a few lines about this help­ful tool.

Note: In Bar­Cuts, Car­lo uses the term Work­flow instead of Apple Short­cuts. This actu­al­ly fits bet­ter, because in the end, short­cuts are just auto­mat­ed work­flows. Orig­i­nal­ly, the app that Apple bought in 2017 was also called “Work­flow” – lat­er it became the Short­cuts app. In the rest of this arti­cle, I will stick to Carlo’s term “Work­flow.”

Installation

You can down­load Bar­Cuts from the Actions­Dot­Work web­site and try it out for 14 days. This gives you enough time to check out all the fea­tures. Right now (May 2025), Bar­Cuts is also avail­able in the Car­los Store at an intro­duc­to­ry price. Like I said before, I use Carlo’s oth­er apps a lot and I can real­ly rec­om­mend tak­ing a clos­er look at them too—since you’re already here, it’s a great oppor­tu­ni­ty to check out what else he’s made.

The instal­la­tion is easy: After down­load­ing, just open the disk image, then copy the app into your Appli­ca­tions fold­er, start it from there, and adjust some secu­ri­ty set­tings. Bar­Cuts will guide you step by step through all the nec­es­sary set­tings. The secu­ri­ty prompts are need­ed because Bar­Cuts needs to access the short­cuts fold­er in the Library direc­to­ry and needs per­mis­sion to run short­cuts.

The app is a menu bar appli­ca­tion that runs in the back­ground after you start it. There’s no clas­sic appli­ca­tion win­dow. But the first time when you launch it, a dia­log win­dow opens with the fol­low­ing options:

1. How­To – Gives a short help on how to use Bar­Cuts.
2. License – Here you can buy and enter the license key.
3. Set­tings – Shows the pos­si­ble set­tings.
4. About – Var­i­ous links to more infor­ma­tion, espe­cial­ly to the Eng­lish doc­u­men­ta­tion and the forum.

Also, the Bar­Cuts icon appears in the menu bar, which in the exam­ple image below is already filled with some work­flows. As soon as the dia­log win­dow is closed, it can be opened again at any time direct­ly from the menu.

How does BarCuts work?

The idea behind Bar­Cuts is that every work­flow you want to start from the Bar­Cuts menu gets a “tag.” For this, Bar­Cuts adds the Bar­Cuts Tag­ger action to Apple’s Short­cuts app, which lets you add so to say meta­da­ta to the work­flow. Bar­Cuts then uses this meta­da­ta to put togeth­er the menu dynam­i­cal­ly, also depend­ing on which app is cur­rent­ly active.

The exam­ple shows a work­flow I described in the arti­cle “First Steps with ‘Brows­er Actions’” Because of the added Bar­Cuts Tag­ger action, this work­flow only shows up in the menu when Safari is active:

In this exam­ple, I placed the action Bar­Cuts Tag­ger at the begin­ning of the work­flow. The­o­ret­i­cal­ly, it could be placed any­where. But I usu­al­ly put it at the start, because oth­er­wise the edi­tor tries to auto­mat­i­cal­ly fill place­hold­ers with val­ues that you would have to change by hand lat­er, which is a lot of work.

The “Bar­Cuts Tag­ger” action offers the fol­low­ing options:

1. As shown in the exam­ple, the work­flow is only dis­played when Safari is active.
2. Sim­i­lar to above, but the work­flow appears in a sub­menu called “Web.”
3. The work­flow is shown in every appli­ca­tion – even in Find­er.
4. With this set­ting, the work­flow is always dis­played, but in the sub­menu “Tools.”

It is pos­si­ble to add sev­er­al Bar­Cuts Tag­ger actions to one work­flow. This way, a work­flow can be tagged for dif­fer­ent browsers, for exam­ple. If you want sev­er­al work­flows to appear in one sub­menu, you just need to give the sub­menu the same name. It is also pos­si­ble to show a work­flow in a sub­menu only when a cer­tain appli­ca­tion is active, while oth­er entries in the sub­menu are avail­able in every appli­ca­tion.
These set­tings offer many ways to cus­tomize things.

The exam­ple above shows a Bar­Cuts menu that is divid­ed into the fol­low­ing sec­tions:

• Work­flows for the active appli­ca­tion
• Work­flows that are avail­able in all appli­ca­tions
• A help text that can be hid­den
• Func­tions to open the Bar­Cuts dia­log win­dow and the set­tings
• Option to quit Bar­Cuts

The rea­son why the work­flow “Have a fin­ger in every pie” shows up in every part of the menu is because, for the exam­ple image, I gave it dif­fer­ent dis­play options.

The Settings Dialog

The set­tings dia­log offers the fol­low­ing options:

Menu bar hotkey

The first point should espe­cial­ly please fans of key­board con­trols: Here you can define a key­board short­cut to open the Bar­Cuts menu. Just click in the field and press the key com­bi­na­tion you want – now the menu will open any­time you press that com­bi­na­tion. You can use the arrow keys to select a work­flow and run it with the Enter key. A bit con­fus­ing: In my exam­ple above, I had to use the right arrow key to get to the sub­menu shown on the left. Whether this is a bug from Apple or in the appli­ca­tion is unclear. But basi­cal­ly, it’s a very use­ful fea­ture

Show hints throughout the app

If this switch is turned off, help text, like the hint in the menu, will no longer be shown.

Show app section in menu if it’s empty

If this switch had been turned off, the sec­tion for the appli­ca­tion, will not been shown if there was no entry defined for the active appli­ca­tion. The same goes for sub­menus: they are only shown if they actu­al­ly have entries that are active in the cur­rent con­text. Oth­er­wise, they are hid­den.

Show general section in menu if it’s empty

If this switch is turned off, the cor­re­spond­ing sec­tion will not be shown if there is no work­flow tagged with “at all times”.

Start BarCuts on login

If this switch is turned on, the appli­ca­tion will start auto­mat­i­cal­ly every time the Mac restarts.

BarCuts vs. Shortcut Menu

If you acti­vate the option “Pin to menu bar” in the details of a work­flow in the Short­cuts app, the Apple Short­cut Menu will appear next to the Bar­Cuts menu. But with Bar­Cuts, you don’t real­ly need the Apple menu any­more. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, you can’t just hide the Apple menu with the built-in tools. How­ev­er, there are two ways to get rid of the Apple Short­cut Menu:
Either you use a menu bar tool like “Ice” to hide the menu, or you remove the “Pin to menu bar” option from all work­flows in the Apple Short­cuts app.

Advanced Features

Get Workflows Action

In the Short­cuts app, Bar­Cuts offers not only the Bar­Cuts Tag­ger action, but also the Get Work­flows action. This action cre­ates a list of

• all tagged work­flows,
• the work­flows that were tagged for the cur­rent­ly active app,
• as well as the work­flows that are always shown.

Right now, I find it use­ful to quick­ly list all tagged work­flows at a glance. I’m curi­ous to see what oth­er pos­si­ble uses for this action might come up – I don’t have a con­crete idea yet, but that’s also because this fea­ture was just new­ly imple­ment­ed.

Command Line Command

At the moment, I find the new­ly added com­mand line tool more excit­ing. With this tool, you can query the Bar­Cuts to see which work­flows are offered glob­al­ly or for the cur­rent­ly active app. After run­ning the com­mand in the ter­mi­nal, you get a result in JSON for­mat. For bet­ter read­abil­i­ty, the result was for­mat­ted with the tool jq:

$ /Applications/BarCuts.app/Contents/MacOS/barcuts-cli | jq

{
  "activeAppID": "com.apple.terminal",
  "activeAppName": "Terminal",
  "activeWorkflows": [
    {
      "fullTitle": "Terminal Workflow",
      "workflowID": "80730E88-5611-4812-9039-9E00D9145E37"
    }
  ],
  "globalWorkflows": [
    {
      "fullTitle": "Have a finger in every pie",
      "workflowID": "9DC37D14-D7B8-408D-95EB-DA15AD52C2D1"
    },
    {
      "fullTitle": "Resize and center active Window",
      "workflowID": "68F2216C-6336-4558-83A0-69E6A6B24FE3"
    },
    {
      "fullTitle": "Tools ≫ Have a finger in every pie",
      "workflowID": "9DC37D14-D7B8-408D-95EB-DA15AD52C2D1"
    }
  ]
}

Along with infor­ma­tion about the active appli­ca­tion – in this case, the Ter­mi­nal – you’ll see a list of active­Work­flows (these are work­flows tagged as rel­e­vant only for the Ter­mi­nal appli­ca­tion) and glob­al­Work­flows. This CLI tool makes it pos­si­ble to cre­ate shell or Python scripts that can access Bar­Cuts meta­da­ta.

Car­lo also pro­vides a solu­tion for a prac­ti­cal use case: con­text-sen­si­tive launch­ing of tagged work­flows using Alfred or Ray­cast. I installed the Alfred ver­sion and now I can eas­i­ly call up con­text-spe­cif­ic and glob­al work­flows with Alfred just using the key­board. After open­ing the Alfred input line, you use the com­mand bc and select the option Show active Short­cut work­flows to see the list of active work­flows. For exam­ple, ⌘p bc ⏎ r ⏎ in the exam­ple below would direct­ly trig­ger the work­flow Resize and cen­ter active Win­dow.

This way, you can use the advan­tages of the Bar­Cuts menu with­out hav­ing to use a mouse or track­pad. I’m curi­ous to see what oth­er automa­tion pos­si­bil­i­ties can be real­ized with it.

URL Scheme (x‑callback-url)

As a third option for con­sume the meta­da­ta from Bar­Cuts, there is the pos­si­bil­i­ty to use the x‑call­back-url mech­a­nism. Since I have hard­ly used x‑call­back-URLs so far, I rec­om­mend the detailed chap­ter in the offi­cial doc­u­men­ta­tion:
Bar­Cuts › URL Scheme (x‑call­back-url) — Actions­Dot­Work. Docs.

Conclusion

Bar­Cuts removes key lim­i­ta­tions of Apple’s Short­cuts menu – the lim­it­ed num­ber of dis­played work­flows, the lack of con­text sen­si­tiv­i­ty, and the restrict­ed options for menu struc­ture. By adding meta­da­ta, Bar­Cuts offers a pow­er­ful alter­na­tive to the native Apple menu. With the com­mand line tool and sup­port for x‑call­back-URLs, you can also inte­grate and use work­flows in oth­er tools. The inte­gra­tion with Alfred and Ray­cast is a first, very promis­ing exam­ple.

So I can only give a clear rec­om­men­da­tion here: If you work with work­flows on macOS, Bar­Cuts is real­ly a must-have.