Copy an action, tweak the JSON, paste it back somewhere else. That’s the whole workflow behind Action Editor, and it exists because the Shortcuts editor won’t expose every value an action actually supports. Grab an action from a shortcut you’re building, run this tool, change what the visual editor hides, and you’re back to pasting within a minute.

What it does

Action Editor reads whatever action is sitting on your clipboard, decodes it into readable JSON, and lets you edit the parameters directly instead of through Shortcuts’ limited input fields. Some values are perfectly legal for the runtime engine to execute even though the editor never gives you a way to type them in. A Wait action’s delay, for instance, only accepts whole seconds through the UI, but its underlying WFDelayTime field happily takes 0.2. Make the change, tap Finish & Copy, and the edited action lands back on your clipboard ready to paste into any shortcut.

How to install

Tap Add Shortcut on this page to open Action Editor in the Shortcuts app.
Scroll the preview to the bottom and tap Add Shortcut again to confirm.
Grab the free Actions app from the App Store — Action Editor calls into it to decode and rebuild the JSON, and nothing works without it.
Check your device is on iOS 16.1 (or macOS 13 Ventura) or newer, the floor this shortcut needs.

How to use it

Copy an action out of whatever shortcut you’re editing, or grab several at once with Shortcut Source Tool if one edit needs to touch more than a single action. Running Action Editor decodes that clipboard content into JSON you can read and reason about. Edit the value you care about: shortening a delay to a fraction of a second, breaking an “Ask Each Time” prompt across two lines, or rewriting a condition so it checks for a line break instead of plain text. Tap Finish & Copy, close the window, and paste the result back into the shortcut you started with.

Use cases

Fractional delays. Set a Wait action’s WFDelayTime to something like 0.2 instead of the whole-second minimum the visual editor enforces.
Multi-line prompts. Insert a line break into an “Ask Each Time” prompt, such as the one on Save to Camera Roll, so it reads across two lines instead of one run-on sentence.
Newline-aware conditionals. Rewrite a Conditional action’s comparison string so it tests for a line-break character, which there’s no field for in the normal condition editor.

Limits

Action Editor only touches what’s on your clipboard, one action (or one Shortcut Source Tool bundle) at a time, so it’s not a whole-shortcut editor. It leans on the Actions app for the JSON conversion, and won’t run at all below iOS 16.1 or macOS 13 Ventura.

Common questions

Do I need to actually know JSON to use this?

Recognizing it helps more than writing it from scratch. Most real edits are single-value swaps, like changing a WFDelayTime from 1 to 0.2, so you’re nudging existing text rather than authoring new structure.

Why won’t this run without the Actions app installed?

Action Editor calls into Actions to turn the clipboard’s raw action data into readable JSON and back again. Skip that install and there’s nothing to do the conversion, so the shortcut has nothing to work with.

Can it handle more than one action at a time?

On its own, no, it works one action at a clip. Copy several together first with Shortcut Source Tool, and Action Editor can run against that whole clipboard payload instead of forcing you through one at a time.