# Lantern

> Lantern is a local, offline semantic search app for macOS 26.2 (Tahoe) or newer on Apple Silicon. It finds files, code definitions, PDFs, photos and the moments in recordings and videos by meaning and by exact words, next to apps, System Settings, Shortcuts and music, in a Spotlight-like panel, in Raycast or Alfred, or from the `lantern` command line. A Swift menu bar app and a Python daemon run the models (EmbeddingGemma 2, Whisper large-v3-turbo, SigLIP 2) with Apple MLX on the Mac; after the one-time model download nothing leaves the Mac, except an opt-in Spotify library sync. Open source under the Apache License 2.0 (the Raycast extension: MIT).

Generated from the repository's README.md and docs/ when the website is built.

## Docs

- [Install](https://misterekkk.github.io/lantern/docs/install/): Requirements and installation, step by step.
- [The app](https://misterekkk.github.io/lantern/docs/app/): The menu bar app and the search panel: keys, filters, previews.
- [How search works](https://misterekkk.github.io/lantern/docs/search/): Meaning and words together; PDFs, code, photos and recordings.
- [Folders and exclusions](https://misterekkk.github.io/lantern/docs/folders/): What gets indexed and how to leave things out.
- [Raycast and Alfred](https://misterekkk.github.io/lantern/docs/launchers/): Search with Lantern from Raycast or Alfred, step by step.
- [Command line reference](https://misterekkk.github.io/lantern/docs/cli/): Command line reference — from the repository's docs/CLI.md.
- [Privacy and security](https://misterekkk.github.io/lantern/docs/privacy/): Privacy and security — from the repository's docs/PRIVACY.md.
- [Background daemon](https://misterekkk.github.io/lantern/docs/daemon/): How Lantern runs in the background and saves battery.
- [Architecture](https://misterekkk.github.io/lantern/docs/architecture/): Architecture — from the repository's docs/ARCHITECTURE.md.
- [Known limitations](https://misterekkk.github.io/lantern/docs/limitations/): What Lantern does not do yet.

## Optional

- [Full documentation in one file](https://misterekkk.github.io/lantern/llms-full.txt)
- [Source code](https://github.com/misterekkk/lantern)
- [Changelog](https://github.com/misterekkk/lantern/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md)