Lightkone Getting started
1. Open Lightkone
Open your Lightkone site in a browser. Its front page says what Lightkone
is; Open Lightkone takes you to the app, which lives at /app/ (for
example https://lightkone.lab.kausalflow.com/app/). Bookmark that address to go
straight to your library next time. There is no account to create. The
first time, a short tour explains the basics. A new library starts with two
example papers, Attention Is All You Need and Transformer models: an
introduction and catalog, tagged Example, so there is something to read
and highlight right away. Remove them (above the list) whenever you like.
They don't come back.
On a phone, use the browser menu's Install app (Chrome) or Add to Home Screen (Safari). Installed, Lightkone opens like an app, works offline with your library and recent PDFs, and appears in the share menu so you can send it papers.
2. Choose where your library lives
At first the library is kept in this browser only. That is fine for a look around. For a library you mean to keep, open Settings and choose a bucket (Cloudflare R2, AWS S3, MinIO) or a private GitHub repository, so it is safe and on every device. Where your library lives walks through each one. Do this before adding much: Lightkone can't yet move a whole library from the browser to other storage.
3. Add papers
Press Add paper (or + on a phone) and paste any of these, one per line:
- an arXiv id or link:
2106.09685,https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 - a DOI or doi.org link:
10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.061102 - a publisher's page for the paper
- BibTeX entries
Details come from arXiv, Crossref, Semantic Scholar and OpenAlex. Free PDFs are downloaded for you: from arXiv always, and from open-access copies once you give a contact email under Settings → PDFs.
To bring a whole library, use Import a .bib file in the same panel. Coming from Paperpile, follow Moving from Paperpile for your PDFs and folders as well.
4. Read
Open a paper and press Read. Select text to Highlight it, add a note, or (with a Claude key) Explain it. See Reading and highlighting.
5. Add a Claude key (optional)
Ask, Explain, Summarize, Cite this's check, and finding papers from a plain description use Claude with your own key. Get one at console.anthropic.com and paste it under Settings → Claude → Anthropic API key. It is kept in this browser only and sent only to Anthropic. Everything else works without it.
Finding your way
- Ctrl K (⌘K on a Mac), or the ⌘ button at the top, opens a command list: type to jump to any tool, folder, tag or paper.
- The side bar holds your folders and tags, and the tools grouped as Discover, Write and Organize.
- ? opens Help.