After starting a search, a list of results will instantly be displayed in the main list window.
By default, the document list is presented in order of relevance (how well the system estimates that the document matches the query). You can specify a different ordering by using the Tools / Sort parameters dialog.
Clicking on the Preview link for an entry will open an internal preview window for the document. Further Preview clicks for the same search will open tabs in the existing preview window. You can use Shift+Click to force the creation of another preview window, which may be useful to view the documents side by side. (You can also browse successive results in a single preview window by typing Shift+ArrowUp/Down in the window).
Clicking the Edit link will attempt to start an external viewer. The viewers can be configured through the user preferences dialog, or by editing the mimeview configuration file.
The Preview and Edit edit links may not be present for all entries, meaning that Recoll has no configured way to preview a given file type (which was indexed by name only), or no configured external viewer for the file type. This can sometimes be adjusted simply by tweaking the mimemap and mimeview configuration files (the latter can be modified with the user preferences dialog).
You can click on the Query details link at the top of the results page to see the query actually performed, after stem expansion and other processing.
Double-clicking on any word inside the result list or a preview window will insert it into the simple search text.
The result list is divided into pages (the size of which you can change in the preferences). Use the arrow buttons in the toolbar or the links at the bottom of the page to browse the results.
Apart from the preview and edit links, you can display a pop-up menu by right-clicking over a paragraph in the result list. This menu has the following entries:
Preview
Edit
Copy File Name
Copy Url
Find similar
Find similar
Parent document
The Preview and Edit entries do the same thing as the corresponding links.
The Copy File Name and Copy Url copy the relevant data to the clipboard, for later pasting.
The Find similar entry will select a number of relevant term from the current document and enter them into the simple search field. You can then start a simple search, with a good chance of finding documents related to the current result.
The Parent document entry will appear for documents which are not actually files but are part of, or attached to, a higher level document. This entry is mainly useful for email attachments and permits viewing the message to which the document is attached. Note that the entry will also appear for an email which is part of an mbox folder file, but that you can't actually visualize the folder (there will be an error dialog if you try). Recoll is unfortunately not yet smart enough to disable the entry in this case.