Raycast and Alfred

Prefer Raycast or Alfred? Keep it and let Lantern do the searching. Lantern keeps running in the menu bar, indexing and answering in the background, and that launcher shows Lantern’s results: code definitions, files with the line, page or moment, photos and video frames, recordings, your music and Shortcuts. Your choices there teach Lantern as in its own panel.

Raycast, step by step

The extension is not in the Raycast Store yet, so it is added once from this repository (needs Node.js: brew install node).

1. Install and open Raycast, and have the Lantern app running.

2. Add the extension:

   cd integrations/raycast
   npm ci
   npm run dev        # adds "Search Lantern" to Raycast; when it says "ready", Ctrl+C (the command stays)

3. In Lantern: Settings → General → Search from: Raycast. Lantern’s own shortcut turns off.

4. Choose how to open it, in Raycast’s settings (sidebar → Lantern → Search Lantern):

   • a hotkey, e.g. ⌥Space. Raycast itself opens on ⌥Space by default: move Raycast’s own hotkey first (sidebar → Raycast → Raycast Hotkey), for example to ⌘Space instead of Spotlight;
   • an alias, e.g. l: type l, a space and your query in Raycast;
   • a fallback: Raycast’s settings → Fallback Commands → add “Search Lantern”. It then appears under every query in Raycast, and ↩ on it shows Lantern’s results for what you typed.

Keys in “Search Lantern”:

Key	Action
↩	open at the line (VS Code, VSCodium, Cursor, Xcode, JetBrains), play from the moment (QuickTime), a PDF at its page (Skim; Preview through its Go to Page shortcut, which needs the Accessibility permission for Raycast), play a song
⌥↩	open from the start (a recording from 0:00)
⌘↩	show in Finder (a song: in Music or Spotify)
⌘Y	preview at the place: the code around the line, the whole passage with your words in bold; a video in QuickTime, paused at the moment
⇧⌘Y	Quick Look of the whole file
⌃1 … ⌃0	filter by kind, the panel’s digits (Raycast keeps ⌘1 … ⌘9 for opening the Nth result); the same again for all kinds

The pane beside the results shows the code around a result (its lines marked ▶), the passage with your words in bold and thumbnails of photos and video frames. Raycast never reads your folders, so it asks for no access to them: the text comes from Lantern, and the thumbnails are made by Lantern into its cache, deleted after 10 minutes (see PRIVACY.md). Details: integrations/raycast.

Alfred

Alfred runs workflows with its paid Powerpack. In Lantern: Settings → General → Search from: Alfred → Install the Alfred Workflow…; then type l and your query in Alfred, or give the workflow a hotkey. ↩ opens at the line or moment, ⌥↩ from the start, ⌘↩ shows in Finder, ⇧ Quick Look. The workflow is not tested inside Alfred yet: feedback welcome. Details: integrations/alfred.

Searches go to Lantern over its local socket and never leave the Mac; what the launcher itself does is up to it (Raycast and Alfred have their own privacy policies).