Cherri

Cherri (pronounced cherry) is a Shortcuts programming language, that compiles directly to a valid runnable Shortcut.

The main goal is to make it trivial and practical to create large Shortcut projects (within the limits of Shortcuts) and maintain them long-term.

🌟 Top Features

• 🖥️ Laptop/Desktop based development (CLI, VSCode extension, macOS app)
• 🎓 Easy to learn and syntax similar to other languages
• 🐞 1-1 translation to Shortcut actions as much as possible to make debugging easier
• 🪄 No magic variables syntax, they're constants instead
• 🪶 Optimized to create as small as possible Shortcuts and reduces memory usage at runtime
• #️⃣ Include files within others for large Shortcut projects
• 🔧 Define custom actions
• 📋 Copy-paste actions automatically
• 🥩 Enter actions raw with custom identifier and parameters
• ❓ Define import questions
• 📇 Generate VCards for menus
• 📄 Embed files in base64
• 🔢 Type system and type inference

Resources

• 🍒 Cherri VSCode Extension
• 🛝 Playground - Try out Cherri on any platform, preview the result, and export signed Shortcuts
• 🖥️ macOS IDE - Defines Cherri file type, write and build Shortcuts on Mac with a GUI
• 📄 Documentation - Learn Cherri or how to contribute
• 🔍 Glyph Search - Search glyphs you can use in Cherri!
• 🧑‍💻 Code Tour
• 🗺️ Idealistic roadmap
• ❓ FAQ

📣 WIP 📣

This project has not yet reached a stable version. It is under heavy development and backward incompatible changes may be made.

Usage

cherri file.cherri

Run cherri without any arguments to see all options and usage. For development, use the --debug (or -d) option to print stack traces, debug information, and output a .plist file.

Why macOS only?

Generating valid Shortcuts is only possible on macOS. However, there is a Cherri Playground that outputs valid Shortcuts on any platform with a web browser.

Development on other platforms

As it stands, I don't want someone to get confused and think Shortcuts compiled using Cherri on other platforms will run on their Mac or iOS device. However, you can build the compiler for your platform, it will just skip signing the compiled Shortcut, so it will not run on iOS 15+ or macOS 12+. Also, note that the compiler is primarily developed and tested on Unix-like systems.

Read my full thoughts on this

Why another Shortcuts language?

Because it's fun :)

Some languages have been abandoned, don't work very well, or no longer work. I don't want Shortcuts languages to die. There should be more, not less.

Plus, some stability comes with this project being on macOS and not iOS, and I'm not aware of another Shortcuts language with macOS as its platform other than Buttermilk.

Community

• VS Code Syntax Highlighting (repo)

Credits

Reference

• zachary7829/Shortcuts File Format Documentation
• sebj/iOS-Shortcuts-Reference
• [Tip] Reducing memory usage of repeat loops

Inspiration

• Go syntax
• Ruby syntax
• ScPL
• Buttermilk
• Jelly

---

The original Workflow app assigned a code name to each release. Cherri is named after the second to last update "Cherries" (also cherry is one of my favorite flavors).

This project started on Oct 5, 2022.