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Lantern

The app

  • Menu bar icon: laid out like macOS’s Battery menu: a status dot in the corner in Apple’s colours (green ready, yellow indexing or waiting for your approval, grey paused, red not running; the word is in its tooltip), the file and fragment counts, a progress bar while indexing, pause / resume only while it applies, and “Lantern Settings…” at the bottom. A card with Index Now / Later appears when new files are found in “ask” mode. Folders are added in Settings → Folders; Quit Lantern is in Settings → About (or ⌘Q in a Lantern window).

  • ⌥Space opens the search panel (Settings → General: ⌘Space instead of Spotlight, or ⌃⌥Space). Results come in sections like in Spotlight: Applications and System Settings (↩ opens them), Definitions (functions and classes, with file, line and signature), Photos (with thumbnails) and Files. Recordings and videos show the moment of the match, e.g. vlog.mp4 · 1:48. The panel can be dragged by its top part; it snaps to the screen’s centre line and its usual height, and its place is kept as a share of the screen, so it fits any display and comes back on screen when a monitor is unplugged.

    • Names that come from macOS (apps, settings, “Ustawienia systemowe”) are shown in the system’s language; Lantern’s own words follow Lantern’s language.
    • To use ⌘Space, macOS’s Spotlight shortcut has to be turned off (System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts… → Spotlight); Lantern says so and opens that page, but never changes system settings itself.

  • Filter icons beside the query field, like Spotlight’s mode buttons (round glass buttons; hover shows the name, choosing one puts it in the field with its ⌘ shortcut). Kinds: Applications, System Settings, Shortcuts, Clipboard, Code, Documents, PDFs, Photos, Recordings and videos, Music. They are folded into one filter button that unfolds when you point at it (once you type, up to three matching kinds show directly; a long query folds them again). ⌘1…⌘9 and ⌘0 pick one, Tab / ⇧Tab move between them, ⌫ in an empty field takes the chosen one out. Esc removes the filter first, then closes the panel; the panel opens empty.

  • Spelling: after a short pause in typing, words that none of your languages knows get the spelling guesses of macOS (on the Mac), and Lantern searches again with the first guess its index knows (a word in your files, an app or a setting): “faktrua za prad” shows “Showing results for faktura za prad · Search for “faktrua za prad” instead”. With no known guess the query stays as typed.

  • ↩ on an answer copies it; on a word definition it opens Dictionary; on a shortcut it runs it.

  • Learned choices: a query you keep answering with the same result (“sl” → Slack) puts that result first from the second time on. ⌥↩ on an app opens a new window (browsers, Safari, Finder; other apps through their menu when menu items are on).

  • Inline completion: while you type, the rest of a likely query appears in grey; → accepts it. Suggestions come from your earlier searches that led to an opened result, then from app and System Settings names, then function and file names in the index (never from the internet, never invented sentences).

  • Shortcut hints: by default the selected result shows what ↩ and ⌘Y do with it (as Spotlight does); Settings → General → Shortcut hints switches to a bar at the bottom or hides them.

  • Shortcuts in the panel (double-click = ↩, ⌥ + double-click = ⌥↩):

    Key Code and text Recordings and videos
    ↩ open at the match (start of the passage) QuickTime Player at the moment it is said
    ⌥↩ open from the top the whole recording from the start, in its default app
    ⌘Y preview in the panel: the passage highlighted, with context preview in the panel from the moment
    ⌘↩ show in Finder show in Finder
    ⌘C copy the file (paste it in Finder or attach it); an app as a file, an answer as its value, a setting, song or shortcut as its name; with text selected in the field, that text copy the file
    ⌥⌘C copy the matched text: the whole passage (code: the chunk with the definition; a photo: the text read from it) copy the transcript at the moment
    ↑↓ / Esc select / close (from a preview: back to the list)
    Tab / ⇧Tab, ⌘1…⌘0 next / previous filter pill, pick a pill
    → accept the grey completion
    • PDFs open in their default app (Preview cannot be told to open a page); ⌘Y shows the matching page in Lantern with the passage highlighted.
    • Files open in the app macOS uses for their type, at the right line when that app supports it: VS Code (verified), Cursor, Xcode, JetBrains IDEs. Other apps (TextEdit, …) open the file at the top; the ⌘Y preview always shows the passage. Lantern never switches to an app other than your default.
    • The first time a recording opens, macOS asks “Lantern wants to control QuickTime Player”. Without that permission ↩ shows the preview from the same moment. Formats macOS cannot play (mkv, webm) open from the start in their default app (VLC, IINA, …).
    • ⌘Y instead of Space: the panel’s focus stays in the query field, where Space types a space. ⌘Y is the Quick Look shortcut of Finder.

  • Settings (Settings… in the menu), laid out like System Settings:

    • General: open at login, language, search shortcut, preferred languages (the macOS ones plus any you add: used for app and setting names and for reading text in images), ask before indexing or index automatically,
    • File Types: photos and the text in them (OCR), recordings and videos (with transcription and video frames), ignored extensions,
    • Folders: indexed folders, Choose What to Index (a folder tree with checkboxes, down to single files, with name search and the number of indexed files), exclusion patterns,
    • Battery and Heat: pause indexing on battery power, in Low Power Mode or when the Mac is hot,
    • Performance: live memory chart of the daemon and the indexing process, peaks, current work and speed, models (revision, size on disk, where they are loaded),
    • Privacy: clear history, compact the index, data folder, macOS permissions; About.

  • Language: the app follows the macOS language (English and Polish today). To choose one for Lantern only: Settings → General → Language (Lantern restarts), or System Settings → General → Language & Region → Applications.

  • The app starts the daemon as its child process, so macOS file permissions (Desktop, Documents, Downloads) are granted to Lantern with the usual “Lantern would like to access…” prompts. When the app quits or crashes, the daemon stops too. If a daemon from the LaunchAgent is already running, the app uses it.