Lantern for Raycast

"Search Lantern" in Raycast: Lantern's results (code definitions, files at the line, page or moment, photos) in Raycast's window. The Lantern app must be running; its daemon answers over its local Unix socket, and nothing leaves the Mac (Raycast's own features follow Raycast's privacy policy).

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, as in the Lantern panel: 30 lines around the code or the whole passage with your words in bold, inside Raycast; a photo in Quick Look (the whole photo); a video or recording in the Lantern app's own player, started at the moment of the match and scrubbable back to the start (Lantern 0.2.1 or newer); ⌘Y again closes it
⇧⌘Y	text and code: Quick Look of the whole file; a video or recording: its frame and transcript at the moment, inside Raycast
⌃1 … ⌃0	filter by kind, the panel's digits (Raycast keeps ⌘1 … ⌘9 for opening the Nth result): Applications, System Settings, Shortcuts, (4, the clipboard: only in the app), Code, Documents, PDFs, Photos, Recordings and Videos, Music; again for all kinds
⌘C	copy the file (paste it in Finder or attach it); an app likewise, a setting, shortcut or song as its name
⌥⌘C	copy the matched text: the passage, the code around a definition, the text read from a photo, the transcript at the moment
⇧⌘C	copy the path

The preview on the right shows the lines around a code result (its lines marked ▶) or the passage with your words in bold, under a thumbnail for photos and videos.

Preference: Also show apps and System Settings (off: Raycast finds those itself; ⌃1 / ⌃2 show them anyway).

Prerequisites

This extension is a front end for the free, open-source Lantern app, which does the searching on your Mac: nothing works without it. Install it first (Apple Silicon, macOS 26.2 or newer) and keep it running:

• download Lantern.dmg from GitHub Releases, or
• brew install --cask misterekkk/tap/lantern

The extension does not install Lantern. Without it, "Search Lantern" shows where to download it; while Lantern is setting up, downloading its models or indexing for the first time, it says so instead of showing no results.

Installation

Install Lantern – Semantic Search from the Raycast Store.

Then in Lantern: Settings → General → Search from: Raycast (turns Lantern's own shortcut off), and in Raycast's settings (sidebar → Lantern – Semantic Search) give "Search Lantern" a hotkey or an alias such as l. Raycast itself opens on ⌥Space by default: to give that to Lantern, move Raycast's own hotkey first (sidebar → Raycast → Raycast Hotkey).

To have Lantern under every Raycast query instead of a separate hotkey: Raycast's settings → Fallback Commands → add "Search Lantern". ↩ on it opens Lantern's results for the text you typed.

The extension never reads your files itself, so Raycast needs no access to your folders: text comes from Lantern, and photo and video thumbnails are made by Lantern into ~/Library/Caches/Lantern/thumbnails (deleted after 10 minutes). Only Quick Look (⌘Y) opens the file. The dropdown beside the search field filters by kind, like the panel's filters.