Shortcuts

Gisti ships six actions for Shortcuts.app. They work whether Gisti is running or not – a shortcut that needs it starts it, in the background, without stealing focus from whatever you were doing.

Actions

Action	Takes	Returns
Create Note	text, optional title	the new note
Capture Screenshot	–	the capture, or nothing if you cancel
Search Items	a query, optionally a type and a limit	matching elements
Open Item	an element	the same element (it shows it in the panel)
Summarize Item	an element	the summary text
Ask AI	a question, optional elements as context	the answer

Everything that takes or returns an element speaks the same currency, so these chain by themselves: a capture, a new note or a search result drops straight into Open Item, Summarize Item or Ask AI. No identifiers to copy by hand, and nothing to convert in between.

Chaining

Describe what you just captured:

1. Capture Screenshot
2. Ask AI – question What is on this screenshot?

That is the whole shortcut. The capture flows into the second step on its own, because every action that produces an element hands over the element itself, not a reference to it. Bind it to a hotkey and you have “explain what I’m looking at”.

Summarize the most recent thing you saved about a topic:

1. Search Items – query deploy checklist, limit 1
2. Summarize Item – element: Shortcut Result

The summary is returned as text and saved onto the element, exactly as if you had pressed ⌘ Y in the panel.

Ask about several things at once:

1. Search Items – query invoice, type Images
2. Ask AI – question Which of these is unpaid?, context: Shortcut Result

Screenshots go to the model as images, notes, clips and chats as text, so a question can span both.

Only two actions open the app

Open Item shows the panel, because seeing the element is the point. Capture Screenshot puts the selection overlay on screen without activating Gisti, so the app you are capturing keeps focus.

The other four return a value and stay out of the way. A shortcut triggered by a folder action or a schedule will not pull the panel up in front of you.

What Search finds

Search Items matches notes, clipboard elements, and text recognized in screenshots, newest first. It is deliberately simpler than the search box in the panel:

• Chats are not matched by keyword. They can still be picked by hand in any element field, opened and summarized – they just don’t come back from a query.
• No fuzzy matching, no installed apps, no semantic search. Semantic search would load the embedding model on every run, which is the wrong trade for something an automation fires in the background.

So a query can return fewer results here than the same words typed into the panel. When you want the panel’s search instead, use gisti://search?q=... – that opens the panel and runs the full thing.

Ask AI and your history

Ask AI does not save anything by default. Turn on Save to Gisti in the action and the exchange is kept as a chat: attachments and all, searchable, and continuable in the panel like any other chat.

Left off, nothing about the run stays behind – useful for an automation that runs every hour and whose answers you don’t want filling the Stream.

How much context fits

Handing Search Items results to Ask AI is the natural way to ask about many elements at once, so there are two ceilings on what one run may send – separately, because text and images aren’t measured in the same unit:

advanced.yaml key	Default	Applies to
aiLimits.askAIContextMaxChars	40000 characters	all text in the request, not per element
aiLimits.askAIContextMaxImages	8 images	screenshots attached as images

Elements are taken in the order given. Past the text budget the rest are dropped; past the image ceiling a screenshot falls back to the text OCR found in it, which is cheaper than losing it. Running out of one budget doesn’t stop the other, so a search returning thirty screenshots and two notes still sends both notes. Both are adjustable – see Advanced config.

Shortcuts or the URL scheme?

Several of these actions do the same job as a gisti:// URL. Which to reach for:

	Shortcuts action	gisti:// URL
Needs a result back	✓ returns a value	✗ fire and forget
From a shell script	✗	✓ open "gisti://..."
From Siri or a voice phrase	✓ Create Note, Capture Screenshot	✗
Chaining without identifiers	✓ pick elements from a list	✗ ids by hand
Available while Gisti is closed	✓	✓

Rule of thumb: a script that fires and forgets wants the URL scheme; an automation that does something with the answer wants the action.

Related

• URL scheme
• AI providers
• Advanced config
• Chat
• Screenshots