Introduction

In my pre­vi­ous arti­cle, I explained the first steps for using Fab­ric to work more effi­cient­ly with LLMs. This was pri­mar­i­ly done through the com­mand line inter­face. As I promised in that arti­cle, I now want to show how Fab­ric can be inte­grat­ed into an Apple Short­cuts work­flow.

As an exam­ple, I will demon­strate how to sum­ma­rize a web­page using the work­flow described in the arti­cle. As a reminder, here’s the CLI com­mand:

wget -qO - https://example.com/my-blog-article | pandoc -f html -t plain | fabric --stream --pattern summarize

My require­ments for the short­cut are:

1. It should work with every brows­er.
2. It will be called from the Short­cut Menu.
3. It will save the result in my Obsid­i­an Vault as a note in a spe­cif­ic fold­er.
4. The title of the web­page will be used as the title of the note.
5. The URL of the web­page and the tag “fab­ric” should be saved in the front­mat­ter sec­tion of the note.

The Apple Shortcuts

Orig­i­nal­ly, I intend­ed to imple­ment the Apple Short­cut using the script more or less as it was. The plan was to fetch the URL of the active web­site with the “What’s On Screen” action, pass it as an argu­ment to the “Run Shell Script” action, and then exe­cute the script. How­ev­er, it didn’t work as intend­ed. While the URL is cor­rect­ly iden­ti­fied with­in the Short­cuts envi­ron­ment, it turns into a link to a local copy of the web­page when the “Run Shell Script” action is called. This can be test­ed with a sim­ple Short­cut.

Just run this short­cut when a brows­er is active, and you’ll see the prob­lem. 😉

In the end, I took advan­tage of this strange behav­ior by sim­ply pip­ing the con­tent of the file locat­ed at the path pro­vid­ed as an argu­ment with the cat com­mand to the fab­ric com­mand.

Before start­ing to define the short­cut, there is anoth­er issue to solve. Since the “Run Shell Script” action doesn’t run in the nor­mal envi­ron­ment of the Ter­mi­nal pro­gram, it can’t access, for exam­ple, the search path def­i­n­i­tions that are set in the .zshrc con­fig­u­ra­tion file. This means it won’t find the fab­ric com­mand or any of the alias def­i­n­i­tions for eas­i­ly call­ing fab­ric, as I explained in the pre­vi­ous arti­cle.

Shortcut definitions

Before start­ing to define the short­cut, there is anoth­er issue to solve. Since the “Run Shell Script” action doesn’t run in the nor­mal envi­ron­ment of the Ter­mi­nal pro­gram, it can’t access, for exam­ple, the search path def­i­n­i­tions that are set in the .zshrc con­fig­u­ra­tion file. This means it won’t find the fab­ric com­mand or any of the alias def­i­n­i­tions for eas­i­ly call­ing fab­ric, as I explained in the pre­vi­ous arti­cle.

Here is the shell con­fig­u­ra­tion that will be used in the script:

# Add the Go binary directory and the path to homebrew commands to the existing PATH environment variable export
export PATH="$PATH:$HOME/go/bin:/opt/homebrew/bin/"

# Check if the fabric-bootstrap.inc file exists in the specified directory
# If the file exists, source it to load its configurations and variables
if [ -f "$HOME/.config/fabric/fabric-bootstrap.inc" ]; 
    then . "$HOME/.config/fabric/fabric-bootstrap.inc"; 
fi

This con­fig­u­ra­tion adds the path infor­ma­tion for the Fab­ric as well as for Home­brew-installed com­mands (in this case, pan­doc). The sec­ond part loads the alias def­i­n­i­tions, allow­ing you to use just summarize instead of fabric -sp summarize.

Now, let’s take a look at the script:

source $HOME/.fabenv
cat $1 | pandoc -f html -t plain | -sp summarize

First, it sources the shell con­fig­u­ra­tion. Then, it calls the com­mand cat $1. Since the vari­able $1 con­tains the local path to the web­page, it pipes the entire HTML, which includes a lot of extra ren­der­ing infor­ma­tion, through the pan­doc com­mand to clean it up before pip­ing it through the fabric/summarize call.

With the script defined, let’s look at the entire Short­cut:

And here’s how the process works:

1. The URL and title of the web­page are passed to the short­cut and stored in the cor­re­spond­ing vari­ables.
2. The title will be cleared of any spe­cial char­ac­ters that might cause issues in Obsid­i­an or Find­er.
3. The “Run Shell Script” action receives the path to the local HTML file through the URL vari­able.
4. The script will be exe­cut­ed as described above.
5. The out­put of the shell script is stored in the Text vari­able. The note is then assem­bled in a text block, includ­ing the front­mat­ter sec­tion and foot­er.
6. This text is then saved in the Obsid­i­an Vault. To save the note in the Obsid­i­an Vault, I use the short­cut exten­sion Actions for Obsid­i­an with the “Cre­ate Note” action. Alter­na­tive­ly, you can save the note with the “Save File” action, but when work­ing with Obsid­i­an, it’s worth invest­ing in Actions for Obsid­i­an.

Some web­pages are resis­tant, and the script can’t fetch them. In such cas­es, at least when using Ope­nAI, the short­cut will save a note with some place­hold­er text.

Sum­ma­ry and Out­look on Future Appli­ca­tions

I hope that with this arti­cle, I not only intro­duced a use­ful tool but also pro­vid­ed a start­ing point for cre­at­ing your own solu­tions on how to inte­grate Fab­ric into Apple Short­cuts.

The short­cut is cer­tain­ly not yet ful­ly refined. For exam­ple, error han­dling is miss­ing. I can also imag­ine that a selec­tion dia­log could be used to choose dif­fer­ent pat­terns. Addi­tion­al­ly, the work­flows cur­rent­ly run local­ly on my Mac­Book Pro, so I haven’t test­ed whether the “Remote Shell Script” action can exe­cute the Fab­ric com­mand on a serv­er. As long as no local LLMs are involved, a Rasp­ber­ry Pi should suf­fice. This way, a short­cut could also work on an iPad or iPhone. I’m cur­rent­ly work­ing on that, so stay tuned.

Feel free to leave crit­i­cism, cor­rec­tions, and praise in the com­ments.