Run a Shortcut
Any Shortcut you've built, by name, with the selection, the word, the sentence or everything before the cursor as its input. Translate it, ask a model, look something up, fetch the weather.
Your keyboard is now a launcher.
Two new things. Shortcuts puts the Shortcuts app, live text tokens, webhooks and links one key press away in any text field. Rewind keeps a short, encrypted record of what you typed, so a crashed app or a reloaded form never loses your words again.
Part of NuKey Pro
Works without Full Access
Nothing leaves your phone unless you send it
Hey, can you send me the address for tonight?
1 · SelectHighlight a sentence in any app, or just stop typing mid-sentence.
2 · Hold ReturnOr press the knob, a switch, the push button, or open the Shortcuts panel.
3 · The Shortcut runsYour text goes in as its input. It can do anything Shortcuts can.
4 · Typed backThe answer replaces the input the moment the keyboard is back.
A sketch of the real thing. The Shortcut in the demo is three actions long and takes about a second.
Shortcuts & App Intents
Four things a key can do now.
An automation is a name, an icon, something to do, the text it works on, and the key that fires it. Make as many as you like, and keep them all on the Shortcuts panel.
Insert text
A snippet with live tokens that fill in as it types. {date}, {greeting}, {secret}, {selection:title}. No app hop at all, instant, and it works without Full Access.
Post to a webhook
Send the text to a URL of yours as JSON, plain text or a form, with an Authorization header if it needs one. Zapier, Make, Home Assistant, a notes inbox. Type the reply back if you want it.
Open a URL
A link with the text filled in. A web search for the word under the cursor, a map, another app's scheme. things:///add?title={input} is one tap from anywhere.
Triggers
Bind it to the hardware on the bar.
Board Controls already gave the keyboard a rotary knob, a push button and two toggle switches. Each one, and each switch position, can now run its own automation. So can holding Return.
Knob pressOne automation on the knob. Turn it for the cursor, press it to run.
Push buttonA big red button in the bar that does exactly one thing.
Switch positionsThree stops on one switch, two on the other. Five more automations.
⏎
Hold ReturnA tap still returns. A hold runs your automation or opens the panel.Shortcuts keyHold the emoji key, choose Shortcuts, and the key opens the panel with every automation on it.
The round trip
How the answer gets back.
A keyboard can't run a Shortcut itself, so NuKey hands it to the Shortcuts app and listens for the answer two ways.
End with Copy to Clipboard
The most natural last step of any Shortcut. NuKey notes where the clipboard stood when the Shortcut left and, when you're back in the field, types whatever is new. Needs Full Access to read the clipboard.
End with Type with NuKey
NuKey's own action in the Shortcuts app. It takes the text and a placement, at the cursor or in place of the input, and works without Full Access. Get Text from NuKey is there too, for Shortcuts that want the input again later.
Jump straight back
Tell an automation which app you'll use it in, Notes, Messages, Mail, Slack, Obsidian or any URL scheme, and Shortcuts returns there the moment it finishes. Otherwise the back link in the status bar does it.
Recipes
Five to start with.
The app ships nine starters you can add with a tap. These are the ones that make people ask how.
Send my ETA
On my way, home in about 24 minutes 🚗
- Get Travel Time to Home, driving.
- Text: On my way, home in about [Travel Time] 🚗
- Type with NuKey, at the cursor.
Say it in Spanish
Oye, ¿puedes mandarme la dirección para esta noche?
- Receive Shortcut Input as text.
- Translate Text to Spanish.
- Type with NuKey, in place of the input.
Where am I
I'm at 12 Baker Street, London W1U 3BW
- Get Current Location.
- Get Addresses from the location.
- Copy to Clipboard, then a Nothing action.
Reply for me
Thanks so much, that works for me. See you at seven!
- Receive Shortcut Input as text.
- Use Model (Apple Intelligence or ChatGPT): "Write a short, friendly reply to this. Return only the reply."
- Type with NuKey, at the cursor.
No Shortcut needed: a 32-byte secret, a password, a timestamp
a3f9c05e…64 hex characters, fresh every press
- Kind: Insert text. Template: {secret} for a Cloudflare or JWT secret, {password:16}, {passphrase}, or {weekday} {date} · {time}.
- Bind it to a switch position. Flick it, and it's typed. No app hop, no Full Access.
Token reference
196 things a key can type.
Write any of these inside the text an automation types, a webhook note or a URL. A token is {name} or {name:argument}. Names don't care about case; arguments keep theirs, so date patterns work. Anything that isn't a token is left exactly as you typed it. Tap a row to copy it.
Rewind · opt-in
Your apps forget. Your keyboard doesn't.
A crashed app. A form that reloaded. A select-all that went wrong. Rewind keeps a short, encrypted, on-device record of what you typed, and the keyboard puts any of it back in a tap. Off until you turn it on, and it is only ever yours.
Message · 2 min agoRunning ten minutes late, order me whatever you're having and I'll
Put backPost · 14 min agoThree things I learned shipping a keyboard extension this year: 1. The host
Put backEmail · 1 h agoHi Priya, following up on the invoice from last month. I've attached
Put backTap to type it back. Nothing is ever restored by itself.
How it works
One field, one session. Rewind captures the text a field holds a moment after you pause, and keeps the longest version it saw, so deleting from the end never shrinks what it saved. Captures shorter than twelve characters are ignored. It keeps up to forty.
Reaching it
Hold the emoji key and choose Rewind, or set the knob, the push button or a switch position to open it. A control only ever opens the panel. The wrong text in the wrong chat is worse than the loss, so there is no blind restore.
Expires on its own
Keep captures for one hour, six hours or a day. Older ones are pruned every time the keyboard loads. Pause it from the panel when you'd rather it looked away, and wipe everything from the app in one tap.
Handled the way a record of your typing has to be.
- Captures live in the keyboard's own private storage, not the shared container. The NuKey app never reads a single character of them. It only shows a count.
- Sealed with a key held in the keyboard's Keychain, marked never-to-leave-this-device, and written with iOS data protection.
- Nothing syncs, nothing uploads, nothing is backed up to another device.
- Wipe destroys the captures and the key that protected them. It cannot be undone, which is the point.
Fields Rewind refuses to look at.
- Secure text entry: passwords, passcodes, anything the app hides as you type.
- Fields marked for passwords, new passwords, one-time codes or card numbers.
- Number pads and phone pads, and any text that is only digits.
- Everything, while it is paused, and everything older than your retention window.
A keyboard only sees the paragraph around the cursor, and cannot tell which app it is in. So the panel labels captures by the kind of field instead: Message, Search, Email, Post, Web.
Pro Shortcuts and Rewind both come with NuKey Pro, the same one-off payment as every theme, switch, lighting pattern and extra. Free users see everything and can turn it on the moment they upgrade.
Good to know
Questions people asked first.
Does running a Shortcut leave the app I'm typing in?
Yes, briefly. iOS gives a keyboard no way to run a Shortcut in place, so NuKey opens the Shortcuts app, which runs your Shortcut and either jumps back to the app you named in Afterwards, open or waits for you to tap the back link in the status bar. Inserting text, posting to a webhook and tokens never leave the field at all.
Do I need Full Access?
Not for most of it. Running Shortcuts, inserting text with tokens, opening links and the Type with NuKey round trip all work without it. Full Access is needed for the two things that need the network or the clipboard: webhooks, and reading an answer a Shortcut copied to the clipboard.
Why does Notes say “Note Unavailable” when a Shortcut returns to it?
Shortcuts passes a run's text output along on the return URL, and Notes reads that as a note to look up. End the Shortcut with Type with NuKey, which produces no output, or add a Nothing action after Copy to Clipboard. The app explains this next to the setting.
Is Rewind a keylogger?
By mechanism a keyboard that records what you type is exactly that, which is why Rewind is off until you turn it on, skips every secure and sensitive field, keeps captures for at most a day, stores them encrypted in the keyboard's private container where even the NuKey app can't read them, never syncs or uploads anything, and wipes with the key. You are the only reader, and only ever by tapping a capture on the panel.
Can Rewind recover text from last week?
No. The longest retention is twenty-four hours and the store holds forty sessions at most. It is a safety net for the message you were halfway through, not an archive.
Where do the tokens run?
On the keyboard, as the text is typed. Dates use your calendar and locale, secrets come from the system's cryptographic random source, and hashes are computed with CryptoKit. Nothing is looked up online.
Ready when you are