Claude Desktop can read what you paste. With GNO installed as an MCP server it can search instead: your Markdown, PDFs, Word and PowerPoint files, meeting transcripts, and code, all from one local index. The installer pins an absolute runtime path plus the active index, config, data, and model-cache locations, so the desktop app opens the same workspace as your shell without inheriting environment variables it never sees.

Connects via: MCP server
Requires: Bun 1.3+ and one indexed folder
Data boundary: Corpus and index stay on your machine

Install

Connect Claude Desktop in one command.

gno mcp install

gno mcp status

gno mcp install --dry-run --json

What it unlocks

Hybrid search over Markdown, PDF, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, and plain text
Cited answers grounded in your own documents
Backlinks, related notes, and graph traversal as tools
Opt-in verified Ask that abstains when the evidence is incomplete
Read-only by default: the 15 mutating tools need an explicit flag

Prove it actually works

A written config file is not a working integration. GNO distinguishes the two, and so should you.

Run gno mcp status to confirm GNO is registered for the target.
Open the Connectors page in gno serve and run the explicit read-only retrieval check. It proves the configured client can actually retrieve, not just that a config file exists.
Ask the client something only your corpus knows. If it answers with a citation into your files, the wiring is real.

Keep reading

Related guides and features.

Claude Desktop setup guide

/docs/claude-desktop

Open

MCP reference

/docs/mcp

Open

AI tool integration

/features/mcp-integration

Open

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