[HN Gopher] Cherri - programming language that compiles to an Ap...
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Cherri - programming language that compiles to an Apple Shortuct
Author : mihau
Score : 211 points
Date : 2026-03-27 23:39 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| threecheese wrote:
| 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.
| Barbing wrote:
| You'll have challenges with this too but you can get something
| by working with the three top labs' models. Tried on Arena.ai
| and sent any errors back (in a personal effort to further iOS
| accessibility, but I digress).
|
| Wonderful project, thank you Cherri!
| alin23 wrote:
| 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.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| Adjacently, does anyone know of a Terraform-like syntax for
| creating GitHub Actions YML files?
| hmartin wrote:
| Could you explain more about how the signing setup works?
|
| (That's what held me back most for spending more effort on
| shortcuts.)
| yg1112 wrote:
| 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.
| mmastrac wrote:
| I wonder if https://crates.io/crates/apple-codesign is
| sufficient to codesign these. Apple usually re-uses these
| sort of things.
| simquat wrote:
| Looks quite cool and I'd like to give a try. What is the main use
| case for compiling code to shortcuts? I ask because I'm working
| on a tool[0] that in a way does the opposite.
|
| [0] https://breadboards.io
| 0x457 wrote:
| What you're doing is visual programming. On its own there isn't
| anything wrong with it. However, specifically with Shortcuts
| it's not very pleasant for anything complex.
|
| I had a full garden automation running on shortcuts, but it was
| extreme hard to maintain and improve due to "editor" being so
| bare bones.
| simquat wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. By the editor being bare bones do you
| mean some missing feature might change your mind about using
| it, or do you find the text-based editor much more
| comfortable?
| 0x457 wrote:
| I was talking specifically about Apple Shortcuts. Once you
| have anything complex, you're going to need code reuse and
| its a sad story with shortcuts as provided by Apple.
| alin23 wrote:
| I've just used this extensively to build 200 Shortcuts for my
| event-based automation app on macOS [0], because some actions you
| simply can't do without Shortcuts: changing Focus Mode, toggling
| Accessibility functions like Color Filters, accessing the Private
| Cloud Compute model etc.
|
| I also wrote about how Claude was able to basically learn the
| language from scratch and write those fully compilable Shortcuts
| for me [1] because it was mind boggling to me that an LLM can do
| that. Curiously, this is becoming more and more normal in my
| mind.
|
| [0] https://lowtechguys.com/crank
|
| [1] https://alinpanaitiu.com/blog/how-good-is-claude-
| really/#che...
| 6thbit wrote:
| Yeah having this opens up the LLM assisting path to build
| shortcuts. Which is great! Maintaining them by hand is not
| _doctor_love wrote:
| Very cool! IMHO Apple Shortcuts will finally get the love they're
| due in the age of AI.
| lemontheme wrote:
| Cool! As a professional programmer few things consistently
| succeed in making me feel inept like trying to build an Apple
| Shortcut
| zimpenfish wrote:
| I felt really smart after I made a fancy Shortcut that did
| complex playlist generation based on rules and whatnots.
|
| Of course, adding music to a playlist broke a couple of updates
| down the line and, as far as I'm aware, still doesn't work
| properly several years later.
|
| (I moved to Marvis Pro[0] because it has reasonably complex
| smart playlists that just about mimic what I was doing with my
| generator except they're transient and not saved as mine were.
| Win some, lose some.)
|
| [0] No link, sorry, because it'd either be iOS App Store or ad-
| laden bloat sites "reviewing" it.
| https://www.reddit.com/r/MarvisApp/ might be worth a read
| though.
| mulmen wrote:
| This is what prevents me from putting any effort in to
| shortcuts. I have zero confidence in Apple respecting my time
| by committing to compatibility or even just not breaking
| things. The constant feature churn from new PM's tearing down
| Chesterton's fence to make way for their own career ambitions
| makes Apple user hostile.
| RationPhantoms wrote:
| Still confused on why there is no social component of this? What
| is the best place to find examples of actual useful Apple
| Shortcuts?
| doc_ick wrote:
| Probably Reddit.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| Specifically https://www.reddit.com/r/shortcuts/ since it
| appears to be the last one standing.
| mwkaufma wrote:
| "shortuct"
| tech234a wrote:
| Apple had the same typo at WWDC 2018:
| https://devdude.me/blimg/wwdc18Keynote/shortcutsApp.png
| kbd wrote:
| What can you do on a Mac with Shortcuts vs AppleScript vs
| Hammerspoon?
| alin23 wrote:
| 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
| _doctor_love wrote:
| I didn't realize _you_ were the Lunar guy! I freaking love
| your apps! Thank you for making good and useful software.
|
| Being able to adjust my monitor brightness during the
| pandemic actively changed my quality of life for the better
| (I was in a small SF apartment).
| alin23 wrote:
| Thank you for the kind words! Love to hear from people that
| were helped by my work!
|
| That was also my pain point with Lunar, working on a small
| balcony in a small apartment where the light from the
| window was constantly changing and the monitor always being
| way too bright or way too dim.
|
| I broke one of those LG monitor joystick OSD buttons before
| I got to building Lunar.
| hrmtst93837 wrote:
| Apple designed Shortcuts to look like a shiny toy demo, and it
| gets awkward fast once you leave the happy path. AppleScript is
| old, weird, and still wired into a lot of Mac apps, but the
| moment it trips over something basic like text encoding you can
| lose an hour digging through forum posts from 2004.
|
| With Hammerspoon, you get Lua and direct macOS APIs, so you can
| push much further if you don't mind writing more glue code. If
| you care about serious Mac automation, you'll probably mix them
| and curse each one for a different reason.
| criddell wrote:
| > Apple designed Shortcuts to look like a shiny toy demo
|
| Apple bought Workflow from DeskConnect (they may have bough
| the entire company).
| Ragingweb wrote:
| I built a small app to follow my infant son's feedings and diaper
| changes. Simply used the shortcuts get content of url to call the
| API rest endpoints. This is much better !
| subhro wrote:
| Is this vibe coded? The README at least looks very LLM-ish.
| woadwarrior01 wrote:
| It's been around for a long time. It's from well before vibe-
| coding was a thing. I first saw it ~3 years ago.
| subhro wrote:
| oh okay. I had no idea and was lazy to check the commit logs.
| duskwuff wrote:
| While it's not in quite the same product category, a name change
| might be in order; this is uncomfortably close to CHERI (cf.
| https://cheri-alliance.org/).
| 0x457 wrote:
| Should we rename fruit as well just in case?
| caycep wrote:
| whither AppleScript?
| wiether wrote:
| Oh boy!
|
| Creating/maintaining Shortcuts is such a pain!
|
| Having to do it on a small iPhone screen with a touchscreen
| keyboard, through a no-code interface...
|
| I want an actual text editor, I want to version things with
| git...
|
| It feels like with Cherri I'll finally be able to actually do
| things!
|
| Thanks!
| pseudosavant wrote:
| This makes me want to spend some time with Codex just to figure
| out something fun to do with Shortcuts!
| wateralien wrote:
| I'm guessing that if Apple can get it right with the next LLM
| based Siri, generating or editing Shortcuts may get easier
| anyway.
| greggsy wrote:
| It does seem like the logical automation platform to prepare
| repeatable tasks that the end user might want to do.
|
| The permissions and secure app integration models are all
| there, and it's reasonably stable.
|
| It was always puzzling why there was never an exportable
| scripting language, just shareable links. I think I ended up
| sharing screen shots with Claude last time I wanted to
| troubleshoot something.
| lynndotpy wrote:
| The biggest problem IMO is the loooooooong animation delay
| built into every UI interaction. It's so hard to get into a
| flow state or even maintain a train of thought when you have to
| wait for everything on the screen to stop sliding, wiggling,
| wobbling, jiggling, refracting, distorting, and flashing.
| gigatexal wrote:
| I wish Apple hadn't gone with shortcuts. Instead I wish they'd
| given us a proper sdk for iOS and macOS as a Python module.
|
| Python is so easy to pick up they could have given it a low code
| drag and drop front end but for us who can code why not a proper
| language ?
| gverrilla wrote:
| typo in title: "Shortuct" instead of "Shortcut" - is this how
| we're gonna distinguish from llm? /s
| wwalexander wrote:
| I take it this only supports Apple's built-in actions, and
| doesn't plug into the broader AppIntents system? AppIntents
| includes a packaging concept, would be cool to see if this could
| use third-party AppIntents in a similar way to how scientific
| Python uses C modules for performance critical sections.
| Pakvothe wrote:
| Love this approach of compiling a readable language to a
| platform-specific format. Same pattern works well for i18n. Write
| in one language, compile/translate to the target formats
| automatically. The developer experience of writing real code
| instead of clicking through a GUI (Shortcuts app in this case) is
| always the right bet for power users
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(page generated 2026-03-30 23:00 UTC)