Shortcuts & Automation

Atlas exposes its core actions to Apple's Shortcuts app and to Siri through App Intents. You can build shortcuts that create documents, pull text and statistics out of a project, edit content and metadata in batches, reorganize your work, and even arrange items on a canvas — then run them by tap, from a widget, on a schedule, or with your voice.

Featured Shortcuts and Siri

A handful of actions ship as App Shortcuts, which means they work with Siri out of the box and appear in Spotlight. Just speak or type a phrase:

Every other action listed below is available in the Shortcuts editor under Atlas, ready to drop into a shortcut of your own.

How Atlas Actions Work

Most actions share a few common ideas, so you don't have to relearn them per action:

• Projects and documents are pickers. Actions that act on your content take a Project and/or a Document parameter. Tap the parameter to choose, or set it to Ask Each Time to be prompted when the shortcut runs.
• An optional Project scopes the picker. Many actions accept an optional Project that simply narrows the document list — handy when you have a lot of projects and want the picker to show only one.
• Batch by default. Editing and organizing actions accept a list of documents, so a single step can act on many documents at once.
• Actions return values. Most actions hand back the documents (or the file, text, or items) they produced, so you can chain one action's output into the next — for example, feed an exported file straight into the system Share action.

Return Values

When an action returns something — a document, a canvas, a list of items — Shortcuts keeps it as a variable you can reuse later in the shortcut. Tap that variable and pick a property to pull one specific value out of it instead of passing the whole result along. A returned Document, for instance, surfaces its Title, Kind, Project, Tags, Synopsis, creation and modification dates, and — when the document is a canvas — its Canvas.

That Canvas property is what bridges the two halves of Atlas. In the example above, a Find Document filter narrows to a single canvas-kind document, and tapping its Canvas property hands that canvas straight to Get Canvas Items (shown as "Get items on…" in the editor) — no separate lookup required. The relationship runs both ways:

• From a document to its canvas — a canvas-kind document exposes a Canvas property you can feed into Get Canvas Items, Add to Canvas, or Manipulate Canvas Item.
• From a canvas back to its document — a canvas exposes a Document property, so you can return to the underlying document to read its synopsis, set metadata, or export it.
• From a canvas item to its document — a card returned by Get Canvas Items carries a Referenced Document property holding the title of the document it points to, so you can see or filter on what each card represents.

Because every action that produces these entities returns them as variables, you can keep chaining: find a canvas document, get its items, filter to cards, and act on what they reference — all within one shortcut.

Action Catalog

Create

Retrieve

Edit

Organize

Canvas

Worked Examples

Append a dated note to a running log

This shortcut adds a timestamped entry to the bottom of an existing document:

1. Add a Text action (or Ask for Input) to capture what you want to record.
2. Add the Edit Document Text action.
3. Set its mode to Append, pick your log document, and set the content to the text from step 1.
4. Optionally set a section title — the current date, say — so each entry gets its own heading.

Run it from the Home Screen, a widget, or by saying "Hey Siri" with your shortcut's name.

Export a draft and save it

This one turns any document into a Markdown file you can send anywhere:

1. Add Export as Markdown and choose the document (or set it to Ask Each Time). Leave Include Front Matter on to carry tags and metadata into the file.
2. Add the system Share (or Save File) action.
3. The file returned by step 1 flows straight into step 2 — no extra wiring needed.

See Also

• Exporting Your Work — The full export tool, and the Markdown frontmatter the Export as Markdown action produces
• Metadata — Defining the fields that the metadata actions read and write
• The Canvas — Cards, pins, and labels that the canvas actions manipulate
• Tags and Search — How project-scoped tags behave