Right now, local and remote externals are searched in parallel if they're both enabled. Local requests are thrown into the work queue first, but's the difference apparent when there's enough worker processes to start all requests right away. This still means local results show up first due to a lack of latency compared to remote externals. The same effect can be had by running the following commands in sequence: lei q -o MFOLDER foo bar lei q -o MFOLDER --remote --no-local --augment foo bar So I'm wondering if replacing the above two commands with one: lei q -o MFOLDER --remote-if-local-missing foo bar It could be a bit of a pain to implement + test + support, though.