topic Re: MacOS Shortcuts not being received by Fusion in Fusion Design, Validate & Document Forum

MacOS Shortcuts not being received by Fusion

ipmcc — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 13:25:21 GMT

I do a lot of 3D printing. One of the things that I'm accustomed to doing when I create production output is I put an almost-ISO8601 date in the STL filename that I export, so I can always be sure that I have the most recently exported version of the file when I go to print.

To this end, I created a macOS shortcut (using Shortcuts.app) that inserts the date, in the format that I want, in almost any text field, but sadly, text input coming from Shortcuts appears to be ignored by Fusion.

I am not an 'automation master' so I can't tell exactly what the problem is, but it's a standard thing: Shortcuts.app ships with the OS, so my general expectation is that it ought to be supported by all apps on MacOS.

Is there something special I need to do to make this work?

Regards,

Ian

Re: MacOS Shortcuts not being received by Fusion

lance.carocci — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 00:34:42 GMT

Thanks for the report. We have not tested this application's interaction with Fusion, but will evaluate if it is feasible.

Re: MacOS Shortcuts not being received by Fusion

ipmcc — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 19:26:27 GMT

Thanks! I appreciate it. I try not to use the word "assume" w/r/t software development (since I loved that when I was an engineer, but...) This kind of functionality would normally use the standard MacOS Responder Chain, so it surprises me that Copy and Paste work in these fields, but that Shortcut typing does not. I'll look forward to seeing how this gets solved. Thanks!

-Ian

Re: MacOS Shortcuts not being received by Fusion

lance.carocci — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 19:55:31 GMT

Generally speaking, we are leaning on the Qt framework for the command UI, and we presume it works with OS features until we discover otherwise (such as in cases like this).

Re: MacOS Shortcuts not being received by Fusion

ipmcc — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 22:06:56 GMT

...sorry to hear that.

I've run (as an IC, EM, and sorta as a PM) multiple large software projects (although probably nothing as large as Fusion) for Windows, Mac, iOS, Linux, and... sadly, some of them used Qt. Making a native-feeling app (to any OS) in Qt has always been exponentially more difficult than simply producing a native app in the first place. I commend you all for creating a reasonably consistent UI-grammar of your own, based on Qt, and one that is not obviously a slave to Qt. You have done remarkably well! It never occurred to me (until just now) that Fusion could be Qt-based. It's clearly not a native MacOS app, but I had always assumed that Autodesk had built their own framework from scratch. Fusion is easily the most intuitive Qt-based app I've ever used, but it's still obviously not a native app, and there are more than a few of defunct native UI patterns like this. But I digress...

I appreciate you looking into the Shortcuts issue, and I hope it's a quick and easy fix. Thanks!

Regards,

Ian