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Lantern

Folders and exclusions

  • Add folders in Settings → Folders (Add Folder…, with a tree to choose what to skip) or with lantern index <folder>. You can add your whole home folder: lantern index ~ --dry-run first counts files and estimates the time without reading or writing anything.

  • Home folder rules (always on): ~/Library is skipped (mail, caches, app data) except iCloud Drive; ~/Applications, the Apple Music library and all macOS packages (*.app, *.photoslibrary, iWork documents, disk images…) are skipped; hidden folders and files are skipped except .github.

  • iCloud: files that exist only in the cloud are skipped (reading them would download them) and indexed once they are on the disk. A file already indexed that iCloud evicts stays in the index.

  • Permissions: Desktop, Documents, Downloads and iCloud Drive need macOS permission. A folder without access is skipped and its previously indexed files are kept; lantern status shows a warning.

  • Always excluded: .git, node_modules, vendor, virtual environments, build and cache folders (target, dist, DerivedData, Pods…); files with secrets (.env*, *.pem, *.key, *.p12, SSH keys id_*, .netrc, credential, service-account and token files, *.tfstate…); lockfiles; everything in .gitignore files, including those above the indexed folder in the same repository (indexing repo/src honours repo/.gitignore); symbolic links (Lantern never leaves the folder you chose).

  • Unreadable or broken files (no permission, a recording cut off mid-write, a text file over 2 MB) are skipped with a reason in lantern status; the rest of the folder is indexed as usual.

  • Choose what to index: in Settings → Folders → Choose What to Index, unchecking a file or folder excludes it; checking an item inside an excluded folder brings back only that item.

  • Ignored extensions (default: .ipynb, .csv, .tsv — notebooks and tables are mostly output and numbers):

    Terminal window
    uv run lantern ignore list
    uv run lantern ignore add json log        # csv, .csv and *.csv mean the same
    uv run lantern ignore remove csv

  • Exclusion patterns and paths:

    Terminal window
    uv run lantern exclude add ~/Downloads/some-library   # a folder or file
    uv run lantern exclude add "*.log"                    # a .gitignore-style pattern, in every folder
    uv run lantern exclude list | remove <pattern>

  • File types: lantern config index_photos false, index_audio_video false, index_video_frames false (also in Settings → File Types). Excluded files disappear from the index at the next scan.

  • Transcription on and off: Settings → File Types → Transcribe speech (Whisper), or lantern config transcribe false / true. The switch is off and greyed out until Whisper is downloaded (Settings → Performance). With it off:

    • new recordings and videos are indexed by their sound only (audio embeddings find what is talked about, not single words or names), plus video frames;
    • transcripts made earlier stay in the index and stay searchable; transcripts still waiting in the queue wait;
    • switched on again, every recording without a transcript is queued for one automatically.

    To delete transcripts made earlier, remove the folder (lantern remove <folder>) and add it again with transcription off. For one run without the daemon, lantern index <folder> --no-transcribe skips Whisper.