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lci

CLI Usage

This page covers the lci subcommands you’ll use day to day: search, grep, symbol lookup, git analysis, and the persistent index server. Every command supports --help. Global flags (-c/--config, -r/--root, --include, --exclude, -d/--daemon) apply across subcommands and can be set via .lci.kdl.

Terminal window
lci --help
lci <command> --help
Section titled “Search”
Terminal window
lci search PATTERN [paths...]

Substring + symbol-aware ranked search across the corpus. The pattern is a literal substring by default (whitespace is part of the pattern, not a word separator); pass -E, --regex for RE2 regex.

Notable flags: -i/--case-insensitive, -j/--json, -E/--regex, -w/--word-regexp, -l/--files-with-matches, --count, --max-count, --rank-by relevance|recency|file-type, --comments-only, --code-only, --strings-only, --context-filter function|class|top-level.

Terminal window
lci search "myFunction"
lci s "myFunction" src/          # alias: s

Grep

Section titled “Grep”
Terminal window
lci grep PATTERN [paths...]      # alias: g

Ultra-fast text search, grep-style output. Shares most of search’s flags (-i, -E, -v/invert-match, -c/count, -l/files-only).

Symbol lookup

Section titled “Symbol lookup”
Terminal window
lci def SYMBOL      # alias: d — find symbol definition
lci refs SYMBOL      # find symbol references
lci tree SYMBOL       # function call hierarchy with annotations

Git analysis

Section titled “Git analysis”
Terminal window
lci git-analyze

Analyzes working-set changes for duplicates, naming, and complexity.

Index server

Section titled “Index server”
Terminal window
lci server [-d/--daemon] [--foreground]   # alias: srv — start the persistent index server
lci status [-j/--json] [-v/--verbose]     # alias: st — show index server status + runtime metrics
lci shutdown [-f/--force]                  # alias: stop

lci server starts a long-running, per-project daemon that serves the HTTP API described in HTTP & Socket API. It listens on a Unix domain socket on Linux/macOS, or a loopback TCP port on Windows. CLI subcommands that need index state (search, def, refs, tree, …) transparently start or reuse this server.

MCP server

Section titled “MCP server”
Terminal window
lci mcp

Starts the Model Context Protocol server over stdio, for AI assistant integration. See MCP Server.

Self-update

Section titled “Self-update”
Terminal window
lci update                    # self-update to the latest release
lci update --check            # report current vs latest without installing
lci update --version 0.6.0    # install a specific release
lci update --force            # reinstall even when already up to date