PDF → LLM summary)¶

Optional role (installSummarize). steipete/summarize turns a URL or a file into a summary: YouTube videos, podcasts, webpages, PDFs, local audio and video. It owns the ingestion pipeline (captions → transcript APIs → yt-dlp audio → Whisper) and then hands the text to whichever model you point it at.

Two things make it a better fit here than a browser workflow: it can reuse an already-authenticated coding CLI as its backend (--cli claude, --cli codex, --cli gemini, --cli pi), so no extra API key or billing account is involved; and the output language is a config key, so summaries come back in 繁體中文 without touching the OS or browser locale. The alternatives that were considered — Gemini in Chrome Skills, the Chrome extensions, a Tampermonkey userscript, the Gemini API's YouTube-URL input — are compared in the superproject's docs/summarization-tooling.md.

Local LLM Tools: the installLlmTools role, if you want a local backend.
Copilot agent gateway: backing the coding CLIs with a GitHub Copilot subscription.
Web reader: the plain page-to-Markdown readers, when you want the text rather than a summary.

Install path¶

Platform	How	Notes
macOS arm64	`brew install summarize` (homebrew-core)	Homebrew pulls `ffmpeg`, `node`, `tesseract`, `yt-dlp` as formula dependencies
macOS Intel	`mise exec -- npm install -g @steipete/summarize`	Avoids Homebrew's pinned-Node conflict and Tier 3 source builds. Needs mise Node 24+; `ffmpeg`, `tesseract`, and `yt-dlp` remain optional external tools for media features
Linux	`mise exec -- npm install -g @steipete/summarize`	No formula exists. Needs Node 24+, which mise's `node@lts` provides. Skipped on the CentOS/RHEL 7 baseline (`oldEL`)
Windows	`npm i -g @steipete/summarize` + scoop `ffmpeg` / `yt-dlp` / `tesseract`	See `dotfiles-windows`' summarize page

The ansible role is dot_ansible/roles/summarize/, tag summarize.

The CLI has no native shell-completion generator (verified with 0.22.0). Do not run summarize completion zsh or completion bash during apply: these are rejected as excess input arguments.

Configuration¶

~/.summarize/config.json is managed as a chezmoi modify_ overlay (dot_summarize/modify_config.json), not as a plain file. Two reasons:

The path is not XDG, and cannot be. summarize hardcodes ~/.summarize/config.json — there is no XDG lookup and no SUMMARIZE_CONFIG override. This is the documented exception to the repo's prefer-XDG rule.
summarize is a second writer. summarize refresh-free rewrites the OpenRouter free-model presets into this file, and --set-default persists a model choice. A plain managed file would clobber both on every chezmoi apply; the overlay merges instead, so our keys stay authoritative and everything the tool wrote survives.

The managed overlay is deliberately small:

{
  "output": {
    "language": "zh-TW",
    "length": "medium"
  }
}

The top-level prompt key is deliberately absent. It replaces summarize's built-in summary instructions — structure and formatting guidance included — for every source type, not just video. Per-source prompts go through --prompt-file instead.

Precedence upstream is: CLI flag → ~/.summarize/config.json → built-in default. So summarize --language en <url> still overrides the managed default per call.

Prompt presets¶

Plain managed files under ~/.config/summarize/prompts/ (summarize never writes here, so these stay XDG):

File	Shape
`youtube-zhtw.md`	TL;DR → 主要論點 → 值得注意的細節 → 重要時間點 → 值不值得完整觀看
`quickscan-zhtw.md`	一句話結論 → 三個重點 → 值得 / 略讀即可 / 跳過

Both fix the language to 繁體中文（台灣用語） and keep technical terms, product names and API/CLI identifiers in their original English.

Commands¶

Wrappers live in dot_config/shell/32_summarize.sh.

# Plain call — already 繁體中文, thanks to the managed config
summarize 'https://youtu.be/xxxx'

# Video: TL;DR + 論點 + 時間點 + 值不值得看
ytsum 'https://youtu.be/xxxx'

# 30-second triage of anything: read it or skip it
sumq 'https://example.com/long-post'

# Full-length summary with upstream's built-in structure
suml 'https://youtu.be/xxxx'

# JSON envelope, for jq or an agent
sumj 'https://youtu.be/xxxx' | jq -r '.summary'

# Reuse an authenticated coding CLI instead of an API key
summarize 'https://youtu.be/xxxx' --cli claude

# Override the managed language for one call
summarize 'https://youtu.be/xxxx' --language en

# Which providers does this box actually have?
summarize status --verbose

How the YouTube pipeline degrades¶

official caption track
        │ unavailable
youtubei / Apify transcript
        │ unavailable
yt-dlp audio → Whisper
        │
        └─→ your chosen model

--slides adds scene-change keyframes and --slides-ocr OCRs them (that is what the tesseract dependency is for). --extract skips the model entirely and just gives you the cleaned source text.

Upgrades¶

Nothing tool-specific: just upgrade-brew covers the Apple Silicon formula and just upgrade-npm covers the Intel macOS/Linux global. See upgrades.