If you do not like reading manuals (who does?) and would like to give Recoll a try, just perform installation and start the recoll user interface, which will index your home directory by default, allowing you to search immediately after indexing completes.
Do not do this if your home directory contains a huge number of documents and you do not want to wait or are very short on disk space. In this case, you may want to edit the configuration file first to restrict the indexed area.
Also be aware that you may need to install the appropriate supporting applications for document types that need them (for example antiword for ms-word files).
Recoll is a full text search application. Full text search applications let you find your data by content rather than by external attributes (like a file name). More specifically, they will let you specify words (terms) that should or should not appear in the text you are looking for, and return a list of matching documents, ordered so that the most relevant documents will appear first.
You do not need to remember in what file or email message you stored a given piece of information. You just ask for related terms, and the tool will return a list of documents where those terms are prominent, in a similar way to Internet search engines.
Recoll tries to determine which documents are most relevant to the search terms you provide. Computer algorithms for determining relevance can be very complex, and in general are inferior to the power of the human mind to rapidly determine relevance. The quality of relevance guessing by the search tool is probably the most important element for a search application.
In many cases, you are looking for all the forms of a word, not for a specific form or spelling. These different forms may include plurals, different tenses for a verb, or terms derived from the same root or stem (example: floor, floors, floored, flooring...). Recoll will by default expand queries to all such related terms (words that reduce to the same stem). This expansion can be disabled at search time.
Stemming, by itself, does not accommodate for misspellings or phonetic searches. Recoll supports these features through a specific tool (the term explorer) which will let you explore the set of index terms along different modes.
Recoll uses the Xapian information retrieval library as its storage and retrieval engine. Xapian is a very mature package using a sophisticated probabilistic ranking model. Recoll provides the interface to get data into (indexing) and out (searching) of the system.
In practice, Xapian works by remembering where terms appear in your document files. The acquisition process is called indexing.
The resulting index can be big (roughly the size of the original document set), but it is not a document archive. Recoll can only display documents that still exist at the place from which they were indexed. (Actually, there is a way to reconstruct a document from the information in the index, but the result is not nice, as all formatting, punctuation and capitalization are lost).
Recoll stores all internal data in Unicode UTF-8 format, and it can index files with different character sets, encodings, and languages into the same index. It has input filters for many document types.
Stemming depends on the document language. Recoll stores the unstemmed versions of terms and uses auxiliary databases for term expansion. It can switch stemming languages, or add a language, without re-indexing. Storing documents in different languages in the same index is possible, and useful in practice, but does introduce possibilities of confusion. Recoll currently makes no attempt at automatic language recognition.
Recoll has many parameters which define exactly what to index, and how to classify and decode the source documents. These are kept in a configuration file. A default configuration is copied into a standard location (usually something like /usr/[local/]share/recoll/examples) during installation. The default parameters from this file may be overridden by values that you set inside your personal configuration, found by default in the .recoll sub-directory of your home directory. The default configuration will index your home directory with default parameters and should be sufficient for giving Recoll a try, but you may want to adjust it later.
Indexing is started automatically the first time you execute the recoll search graphical user interface, or by executing the recollindex command.
Searches are performed inside the recoll program, which has many options to help you find what you are looking for.
Indexing is the process by which the set of documents is analyzed and the data entered into the database. Recoll indexing is normally incremental: documents will only be processed if they have been modified. On the first execution, of course, all documents will need processing. A full index build can be forced later by specifying an option to the indexing command (recollindex -z).
Recoll indexing can be performed with two different methods:
Periodic indexing: indexing takes place at discrete times, by executing the recollindex command. The typical usage is to have a nightly indexing run programmed into your cron file.
Real time indexing: indexing takes place as soon as a file is created or changed. recollindex runs as a daemon and uses a file system alteration monitor such as Fam, Gamin or inotify do detect file changes. Monitoring a big directory tree can consume significant system resources.
The choice between the two methods is mostly a matter of preference, and they can be combined by setting up multiple indexes (ie: use periodic indexing on a big documentation directory, and real time indexing on a small home directory). Monitoring a big file system tree can consume significant system resources, for dubious gains.
Recoll knows about quite a few different document types. The parameters for document types recognition and processing are set in configuration files Most file types, like HTML or word processing files, only hold one document. Some file types, like mail folder files can hold many individually indexed documents.
Recoll indexing processes plain text, HTML, openoffice and e-mail files internally. Other types (ie: postscript, pdf, ms-word, rtf) need external applications for preprocessing. The list is in the installation section.
Without further configuration, Recoll will index all appropriate files from your home directory, with a reasonable set of defaults.
In some cases, it may be interesting to index different areas of the file system to separate databases. You can do this by using multiple configuration directories, each indexing a file system area to a specific database. See the section about using multiple databases for more information on multiple configurations and indexes.
The default location for the index data is the xapiandb subdirectory of the Recoll configuration directory, typically $HOME/.recoll/xapiandb/. This can be changed via two different methods (with different purposes):
You can specify a different configuration directory by setting the RECOLL_CONFDIR environment variable, or using the -c option to the Recoll commands. This method would typically be used to index different areas of the file system to different indexes. For example, if you were to issue the following commands:
export RECOLL_CONFDIR=~/.indexes-email
recoll
Then Recoll would use configuration files stored in ~/.indexes-email/ and, (unless specified otherwise in recoll.conf) would look for the index in ~/.indexes-email/xapiandb/. Using multiple configuration directories and configuration options allows you to tailor multiple configurations and indexes to handle whatever subset of the available data that you wish to make searchable.
You can also specify a different storage location for the index by setting the dbdir parameter in the configuration file (see the configuration section). This method would mainly be of use if you wanted to keep the configuration directory in its default location, but desired another location for the index, typically out of disk occupation concerns.
The size of the index is determined by the size of the set of documents, but the ratio can vary a lot. For a typical mixed set of documents, the index size will often be close to the data set size. In specific cases (a set of compressed mbox files for example), the index can become much bigger than the documents. It may also be much smaller if the documents contain a lot of images or other non-indexed data (an extreme example being a set of mp3 files where only the tags would be indexed).
Of course, images, sound and video do not increase the index size, which means that it will be quite typical nowadays (2006), that even a big index will be negligible against the total amount of data on the computer.
The index data directory (xapiandb) only contains data that can be completely rebuilt by an index run, and it can always be destroyed safely.
The Recoll index does not hold copies of the indexed documents. But it does hold enough data to allow for an almost complete reconstruction. If confidential data is indexed, access to the database directory should be restricted.
As of version 1.4, Recoll will create the configuration directory with a mode of 0700 (access by owner only). As the index data directory is by default a sub-directory of the configuration directory, this should result in appropriate protection.
If you use another setup, you should think of the kind of protection you need for your index, and set the directory and files access modes appropriately.
You can control which areas of the file system are indexed, and how files are processed, by setting variables inside the Recoll configuration files.
You can also use multiple indexes defined by separate configurations, typically to separate personal and shared indexes, or to take advantage of the organization of your data to improve search precision.
The first time you start recoll, you will be asked whether or not you would like recoll to build the index. If you want to adjust the configuration before indexing, just click Cancel at this point. That way, recoll will have created a ~/.recoll directory containing empty configuration files.
The configuration is documented inside the installation chapter of this document, or in the recoll.conf(5) man page. The most immediately useful variable you may interested in is probably topdirs, which determines what subtrees get indexed.
The applications needed to index file types other than text, HTML or email (ie: pdf, postscript, ms-word...) are described in the external packages section
Indexing is performed either by the recollindex program, or by the indexing thread inside the recoll program (use the File menu). Both programs will use of the RECOLL_CONFDIR variable or accept a -c confdir option to specify the configuration directory to be used.
If the recoll program finds no index when it starts, it will automatically start indexing (except if canceled).
It is best to avoid interrupting the indexing process, as this may sometimes leave the index in a bad state. This is not a serious problem, as you then just need to delete the index files and restart the indexing. The index files are normally stored in the $HOME/.recoll/xapiandb directory, which you can just delete if needed. Alternatively, you can start recollindex with option -z, which will reset the database before indexing.
The most common way to set up indexing is to have a cron task execute it every night. For example the following crontab entry would do it every day at 3:30AM (supposing recollindex is in your PATH):
30 3 * * * recollindex > /tmp/recolltrace 2>&1
The usual command to edit your crontab is crontab -e (which will usually start the vi editor to edit the file). You may have more sophisticated tools available on your system.
Real time monitoring/indexing is performed by starting the recollindex -m command. With this option, recollindex will detach from the terminal and become a daemon, permanently monitoring file changes and updating the index.
The real time indexing support can be customised during package configuration with the --with[out]-fam or --with[out]-inotify options. The default is currently to include inotify monitoring on systems that support it.
The rclmon.sh script can be used to easily start and stop the daemon. It can be found in the examples directory (typically /usr/local/[share/]recoll/examples).
Starting the daemon is normally performed as part of the user session script. For example, my out of fashion xdm-based session has a .xsession script with the following lines at the end:
recollconf=$HOME/.recoll-home recolldata=/usr/local/share/recoll RECOLL_CONFDIR=$recollconf $recolldata/examples/rclmon.sh start fvwm
The indexing daemon gets started, then the window manager, for which the session waits.
By default the indexing daemon will monitor the state of the X11 session, and exit when it finishes, it is not necessary to kill it explicitely. (The X11 server monitoring can be disabled with option -x to recollindex).
Under KDE, you can place a small script to start recollindex -m under $HOME/.kde/Autostart. This will be executed when the session begins.
There is a similar mechanism under Gnome (find the session control tool in the menus and use the "Startup programs" tab).
By default, the indexing daemon will write its messages to a file inside the configuration directory (this is controlled by the daemlogfilename and daemloglevel configuration parameters). You may want to change this. Also the log file will only be truncated when the daemon starts. If the daemon runs permanently, the log file may grow quite big, depending on the log level.
While it is convenient that data is indexed in real time, repeated indexing can generate a significant load on the system when files such as email folders change. You probably do not want to enable it if your system is short on resources. Periodic indexing is adequate in most cases.
The recoll program provides the user interface for searching. It is based on the QT library.
Start the recoll program.
Possibly choose a search mode: Any term or All terms or File name.
Enter search term(s) in the text field at the top of the window.
Click the Search button or hit the Enter key to start the search.
The initial default search mode is All terms. This will look for documents containing all of the search terms (the ones with more terms will get better scores). Any term will search for documents where at least one of the terms appear. File name will specifically look for file names.
The fourth entry (Query Language) is described in its own section.
All search modes allow wildcards inside terms (*, ?, []). You may want to have a look at the section about wildcards for more information about this.
You can search for exact phrases (adjacent words in a given order) by enclosing the input inside double quotes. Ex: "virtual reality".
Character case has no influence on search, except that you can disable stem expansion for any term by capitalizing it. Ie: a search for floor will also normally look for flooring, floored, etc., but a search for Floor will only look for floor, in any character case (stemming can also be disabled globally in the preferences).
Recoll remembers the last few searches that you performed. You can use the simple search text entry widget (a combobox) to recall them (click on the thing at the right of the text field). Please note, however, that only the search texts are remembered, not the mode (all/any/file name).
Typing Esc Space while entering a word in the simple search entry will open a window with possible completions for the word. The completions are extracted from the database.
Double-clicking on a word in the result list or a preview window will insert it into the simple search entry field.
Note that, apart from wildcard characters (single ? characters are ok), you can cut and paste any text into an All terms or Any term search field, punctuation, newlines and all. Recoll will process it and produce a meaningful search. This is what most differentiates this mode from the Query Language mode, where you have to care about the syntax.
You can use the Tools / Advanced search dialog for more complex searches.
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.
The preview window opens when you first click a Preview link inside the result list.
Subsequent preview requests for a given search open new tabs in the existing window (except if you hold the Shift key while clicking which will open a new window for side by side viewing).
Starting another search and requesting a preview will create a new preview window. The old one stays open until you close it.
You can close a preview tab by typing ^W (Ctrl + W) in the window. Closing the last tab for a window will also close the window.
Of course you can also close a preview window by using the window manager button in the top of the frame.
You can display successive or previous documents from the result list inside a preview tab by typing Shift+Down or Shift+Up (Down and Up are the arrow keys).
The preview tabs have an internal incremental search function. You initiate the search either by typing a / (slash) inside the text area or by clicking into the Search for: text field and entering the search string. You can then use the Next and Previous buttons to find the next/previous occurrence. You can also type F3 inside the text area to get to the next occurrence.
If you have a search string entered and you use ^Up/^Down to browse the results, the search is initiated for each successive document. If the string is found, the cursor will be positioned at the first occurrence of the search string.
The query language processor is activated on the simple search entry when the search mode selector is set to Query Language.
Here follows a sample request that we are going to explain:
mime:message/rfc822 author:"john doe" Beatles OR Lennon Live OR Unplugged -potatoes
This would search for all email messages with John Doe appearing as a phrase in the From: header, and containing either beatles or lennon and either live or unplugged but not potatoes.
The first element, mime:message/rfc822 is a special switch that restricts the results to be email messages. There could be several such switches, which would form a list of allowed types.
The second element author:"john doe" is a phrase search limited to a specific field. Phrase searches are specified as usual by enclosing the words in double quotes. The field specification appears before the colon. Recoll currently manages the following fields:
title, subject or caption are synonyms which specify data to be searched for in the document title or subject.
author or from for searching the documents originators.
keyword for searching the document specified keywords (few documents actually have any).
The query language is currently the only way to use the Recoll field search capability.
All elements in the search entry are normally combined with an implicit AND. It is possible to specify that elements be OR'ed instead, as in Beatles OR Lennon. The OR must be entered literally (capitals), and it has priority over the AND associations: word1 word2 OR word3 means word1 AND (word2 OR word3) not (word1 AND word2) OR word3. Do not enter explicit parenthesis, they are not supported for now.
An entry preceded by a - specifies a term that should not appear.
Words inside phrases and capitalized words are not stem-expanded. Wildcards may be used anywhere.
You can use the show query link at the top of the result list to check the exact query which was finally executed by Xapian.
The advanced search dialog has a number of fields that will allow a more refined search. Each entry field is configurable for the following modes:
All terms.
Any term.
None of the terms.
Phrase (exact terms in order within an adjustable window).
Proximity (terms in any order within an adjustable window).
Filename search with wildcards.
Additional entry fields can be created by clicking the Add clause button.
You can choose that all relevant fields will be combined by either an AND or an OR conjunction. All types of clauses except "phrase" and "near" can accept a mix of single words and phrases enclosed in double quotes. Stemming expansion will be performed for all terms not beginning with a capital letter, except for terms inside "phrase" clauses. Wildcards will be processed everywhere.
Advanced search will also let you search for documents of specific mime types (ie: only text/plain, or text/HTML or application/pdf etc...). The state of the file type selection can be saved as the default (the file type filter will not be activated at program start-up, but the lists will be in the restored state).
You can also restrict the search results to a sub-tree of the indexed area. If you need to do this often, you may think of setting up multiple indexes instead, as the performance will be much better.
Click on the Start Search button in the advanced search dialog, or type Enter in any text field to start the search. The button in the main window always performs a simple search.
Click on the Show query details link at the top of the result page to see the query expansion.
Recoll automatically manages the expansion of search terms to their derivatives (ie: plural/singular, verb inflections). But there are other cases where the exact search term is not known. For example, you may not remember the exact spelling, or only know the beginning of the name.
The term explorer tool (started from the toolbar icon or from the Term explorer entry of the Tools menu) can be used to search the full index terms list. It has three modes of operations:
In this mode of operation, you can enter a search string with shell-like wildcards (*, ?, []). ie: xapi* would display all index terms beginning with xapi. (More about wildcards here).
This mode will accept a regular expression as input. Example: word[0-9]+. The expression is implicitely anchored at the beginning. Ie: press will match pression but not expression. You can use .*press to match the latter, but be aware that this will cause a full index term list scan, which can be quite long.
This mode will perform the usual stem expansion normally done as part user input processing. As such it is probably mostly useful to demonstrate the process.
In this mode, you enter the term as you think it is spelled, and Recoll will do its best to find index terms that sound like your entry. This mode uses the Aspell spelling application, which must be installed on your system for things to work. The language which is used to build the dictionary out of the index terms (which is done at the end of an indexing pass) is the one defined by your NLS environment. Weird things will probably happen if languages are mixed up.
Note that in cases where Recoll does not know the beginning of the string to search for (ie a wildcard expression like *coll), the expansion can take quite a long time because the full index term list will have to be processed. The expansion is currently limited at 200 results for wildcards and regular expressions.
Double-clicking on a term in the result list will insert it into the simple search entry field. You can also cut/paste between the result list and any entry field (the end of lines will be taken care of).
All words entered in Recoll search fields will be processed for wildcard expansion before the request is finally executed.
The wildcard characters are:
* which matches 0 or more characters.
? which matches a single character.
[] which allow defining sets of characters to be matched (ex: [abc] matches a single character which may be 'a' or 'b' or 'c', [0-9] matches any number.
You should be aware of a few things before using wildcards.
Using a wildcard character at the beginning of a word can make for a slow search because Recoll will have to scan the whole index term list to find the matches.
Using a * at the end of a word can produce more matches than you would think, and strange search results. You can use the term explorer tool to check what completions exist for a given term. You can also see exactly what search was performed by clicking on the link at the top of the result list. In general, for natural language terms, stem expansion will produce better results than an ending * (stem expansion is turned off when any wildcard character appears in the term).
Multiple Recoll databases or indexes can be created by using several configuration directories which are usually set to index different areas of the file system. A specific index can be selected for updating or searching, using the RECOLL_CONFDIR environment variable or the -c option to recoll and recollindex.
A recollindex program instance can only update one specific index.
A recoll program instance is also associated with a specific index, which is the one to be updated by its indexing thread, but it can use any number of Recoll indexes for searching. The external indexes can be selected through the external indexes tab in the preferences dialog.
Index selection is performed in two phases. A set of all usable indexes must first be defined, and then the subset of indexes to be used for searching. Of course, these parameters are retained across program executions (there are kept separately for each Recoll configuration). The set of all indexes is usually quite stable, while the active ones might typically be adjusted quite frequently.
The main index (defined by RECOLL_CONFDIR) is always active. If this is undesirable, you can set up your base configuration to index an empty directory.
As building the set of all indexes can be a little tedious when done through the user interface, you can use the RECOLL_EXTRA_DBS environment variable to provide an initial set. This might typically be set up by a system administrator so that every user does not have to do it. The variable should define a colon-separated list of index directories, ie:
export RECOLL_EXTRA_DBS=/some/place/xapiandb:/some/other/db
A typical usage scenario for the multiple index feature would be for a system administrator to set up a central index for shared data, that you choose to search or not in addition to your personal data. Of course, there are other possibilities. There are many cases where you know the subset of files that should be searched, and where narrowing the search can improve the results. You can achieve approximately the same effect with the directory filter in advanced search, but multiple indexes will have much better performance and may be worth the trouble.
Documents that you actually view (with the internal preview or an external tool) are entered into the document history, which is remembered. You can display the history list by using the Tools/Doc History menu entry.
The documents in a result list are normally sorted in order of relevance. It is possible to specify different sort parameters by using the Sort parameters dialog (located in the Tools menu).
The tool sorts a specified number of the most relevant documents in the result list, according to specified criteria. The currently available criteria are date and mime type.
The sort parameters stay in effect until they are explicitly reset, or the program exits. An activated sort is indicated in the result list header.
Term completion. Typing Esc Space in the simple search entry field while entering a word will either complete the current word if its beginning matches a unique term in the index, or open a window to propose a list of completions.
Picking up new terms from result or preview text. Double-clicking on a word in the result list or in a preview window will copy it to the simple search entry field.
Disabling stem expansion. Entering a capitalized word in any search field will prevent stem expansion (no search for gardening if you enter Garden instead of garden). This is the only case where character case should make a difference for a Recoll search. You can also disable stem expansion or change the stemming language in the preferences.
Phrases. A phrase can be looked for by enclosing it in double quotes. Example: "user manual" will look only for occurrences of user immediately followed by manual. You can use the This exact phrase field of the advanced search dialog to the same effect. Phrases can be entered along simple terms in all simple or advanced search entry fields (except This exact phrase).
Browsing the result list inside a preview window (1.5). Entering Shift-Down or Shift-Up (Shift + an arrow key) in a preview window will display the next or the previous document from the result list. Any secondary search currently active will be executed on the new document.
Forced opening of a preview window (1.6). You can use Shift+Click on a result list Preview link to force the creation of a preview window instead of a new tab in the existing one.
AutoPhrases (1.5). This option can be set in the preferences dialog. If it is set, a phrase will be automatically built and added to simple searches when looking for Any terms. This will not change radically the results, but will give a relevance boost to the results where the search terms appear as a phrase. Ie: searching for virtual reality will still find all documents where either virtual or reality or both appear, but those which contain virtual reality should appear sooner in the list.
Finding related documents. Selecting the Find similar documents entry in the result list paragraph right-click menu will select a set of "interesting" terms from the current result, and insert them into the simple search entry field. You can then possibly edit the list and start a search to find documents which may be apparented to the current result.
File names. File names are added as terms during indexing, and you can specify them as ordinary terms in normal search fields (Recoll used to index all directories in the file path as terms. This has been abandoned as it did not seem really useful). Alternatively, you can use the specific file name search which will only look for file names and can use wildcard expansion.
Query explanation. You can get an exact description of what the query looked for, including stem expansion, and Boolean operators used, by clicking on the result list header.
Closing previews. Entering ^W in a tab will close it (and, for the last tab, close the preview window). Entering Esc will close the preview window and all its tabs.
Quitting. Entering ^Q almost anywhere will close the application.
It is possible to customize some aspects of the search interface by using Query configuration entry in the Preferences menu.
There are two tabs in the dialog, dealing with the interface itself, and with the parameters used for searching and returning results.
User interface parameters:
Number of results in a result page
Result list font: There is quite a lot of information shown in the result list, and you may want to customize the font and/or font size. The rest of the fonts used by Recoll are determined by your generic QT config (try the qtconfig command.
Result paragraph format string: allows you to change the presentation of each result list entry. This is a qt-html string where the following printf-like % substitutions will be performed:
%A. Abstract
%D. Date
%K. Keywords (if any)
%L. Preview and Edit links
%M. Mime type
%N. result Number
%R. Relevance percentage
%S. Size information
%T. Title
%U. Url
%R %S %L <b>%T</b><br>
%M %D <i>%U</i><br>
%A %K
You may, for example, try the following for a more web-like experience:
<u><b><a href="P%N">%T</a></b></u><br>
%A<font color=#008000>%U - %S</font> - %L
The format of the Preview and Edit links is <a href="Pdocnum"> and <a href="Edocnum"> where docnum is what %N would print. This makes the title a
preview link in the above format. HTML help browser: this will let you chose your preferred browser which will be started from the Help menu to read the user manual. You can enter a simple name if the command is in your PATH, or browse for a full pathname.
Show document type icons in result list: icons in the result list can be turned off. They take quite a lot of space and convey relatively little useful information.
Auto-start simple search on white space entry: if this is checked, a search will be executed each time you enter a space in the simple search input field. This lets you look at the result list as you enter new terms. This is off by default, you may like it or not...
Start with advanced search dialog open and Start with sort dialog open: If you use these dialogs all the time, checking these entries will get them to open when recoll starts.
Use desktop preferences to choose document editor: if this is checked, the xdg-open utility will be used to open files when you click the Edit link in the result list, instead of the application defined in mimeview. xdg-open will in term use your desktop preferences to choose an appropriate application.
Search parameters:
Stemming language: stemming obviously depends on the document's language. This listbox will let you chose among the stemming databases which were built during indexing (this is set in the main configuration file), or later added with recollindex -s (See the recollindex manual). Stemming languages which are dynamically added will be deleted at the next indexing pass unless they are also added in the configuration file.
Dynamically build abstracts: this decides if Recoll tries to build document abstracts when displaying the result list. Abstracts are constructed by taking context from the document information, around the search terms. This can slow down result list display significantly for big documents, and you may want to turn it off.
Replace abstracts from documents: this decides if we should synthesize and display an abstract in place of an explicit abstract found within the document itself.
Synthetic abstract size: adjust to taste...
Synthetic abstract context words: how many words should be displayed around each term occurrence.
External indexes: This panel will let you browse for additional indexes that you may want to search. External indexes are designated by their database directory (ie: /home/someothergui/.recoll/xapiandb, /usr/local/recollglobal/xapiandb).
Once entered, the indexes will appear in the External indexes list, and you can chose which ones you want to use at any moment by checking or unchecking their entries.
Your main database (the one the current configuration indexes to), is always implicitly active. If this is not desirable, you can set up your configuration so that it indexes, for example, an empty directory.
Recoll binary installations are always linked statically to the xapian libraries, and have no other dependencies. You will only have to check or install supporting applications for the file types that you want to index beyond text, HTML and mail files.
If you use a BSD-type port system or a prebuilt package (RPM or other), just follow the usual procedure, and maybe have a look at the configuration section (but this may not be necessary for a quick test with default parameters).
The unpackaged binary versions are just compressed tar files of a build tree, where only the useful parts were kept (executables and sample configuration).
The executable binary files are built with a static link to libxapian and libiconv, to make installation easier (no dependencies). However, this also means that you cannot change the versions which are used.
After extracting the tar file, you can proceed with installation as if you had built the package from source (that is, just type make install). The binary trees are built for installation to /usr/local.
You may then need to install external applications to process some file types that you want indexed (ie: acrobat, postscript ...). See next section.
Finally, you may want to have a look at the configuration section.
Recoll uses external applications to index some file types. You need to install them for the file types that you wish to have indexed (these are run-time dependencies. None is needed for building Recoll):
Openoffice: supported natively, but needs the unzip command to be installed.
PDF: pdftotext is part of the Xpdf package.
Postscript: pstotext.
MS Word: antiword.
MS Excel and PowerPoint: catdoc.
RTF: unrtf
dvi: dvips
djvu: DjVuLibre
MP3: Recoll will use the id3info command from the id3lib package to extract tag information. Without it, only the file names will be indexed.
Text, HTML, mail folders Openoffice and Scribus files are processed internally. Lyx is used to index Lyx files. Many filters need sed and awk.
At the very least, you will need to download and install the xapian core package (Recoll development currently uses version 0.9.5), and the qt run-time and development packages (Recoll development currently uses version 3.3.5, but any 3.3 version is probably OK).
You will most probably be able to find a binary package for qt for your system. You may have to compile Xapian but this is not difficult (if you are using FreeBSD, there is a port).
You may also need libiconv. Recoll currently uses version 1.9 (this should not be critical). On Linux systems, the iconv interface is part of libc and you should not need to do anything special.
Recoll has been built on Linux (redhat7.3, mandriva 2005/6, Fedora Core 3/4/5), FreeBSD and Solaris 8. If you build on another system, I would very much welcome patches.
Depending on the qt configuration on your system, you may have to set the QTDIR and QMAKESPECS variables in your environment:
QTDIR should point to the directory above the one that holds the qt include files (ie: if qt.h is /usr/local/qt/include/qt.h, QTDIR should be /usr/local/qt).
QMAKESPECS should be set to the name of one of the qt mkspecs sub-directories (ie: linux-g++).
On many Linux systems, QTDIR is set by the login scripts, and QMAKESPECS is not needed because there is a default link in mkspecs/.
Configure options: --without-aspell will disable the code for phonetic matching of search terms. --with-fam or --with-inotify will enable the code for real time indexing. Inotify support is enabled by default on recent Linux systems.
Normal procedure:
cd recoll-xxx
configure
make
(practices usual hardship-repelling invocations)
There little auto-configuration. The configure script will mainly link one of the system-specific files in the mk directory to mk/sysconf. If your system is not known yet, it will tell you as much, and you may want to manually copy and modify one of the existing files (the new file name should be the output of uname -s).
Either type make install or execute recollinstall prefix, in the root of the source tree. This will copy the commands to prefix/bin and the sample configuration files, scripts and other shared data to prefix/share/recoll.
If the installation prefix given to recollinstall is different from what was specified when executing configure, you will have to set the RECOLL_DATADIR environment variable to indicate where the shared data is to be found.
You can then proceed to configuration.
Most of the parameters specific to the recoll GUI are set through the Preferences menu and stored in the standard QT place ($HOME/.qt/recollrc). You probably do not want to edit this by hand.
For other options, Recoll uses text configuration files. You will have to edit them by hand for now (there is still some hope for a GUI configuration tool in the future). The most accurate documentation for the configuration parameters is given by comments inside the default files, and we will just give a general overview here.
There are two sets of configuration files. The system-wide files are kept in a directory named like /usr/[local/]share/recoll/examples, they define default values for the system. A parallel set of files exists by default in the .recoll directory in your home. This directory can be changed with the RECOLL_CONFDIR environment variable or the -c option parameter to recoll and recollindex.
If the .recoll directory does not exist when recoll or recollindex are started, it will be created with a set of empty configuration files. recoll will give you a chance to edit the configuration file before starting indexing. recollindex will proceed immediately. To avoid mistakes, the automatic directory creation will only occur for the default location, not if -c or RECOLL_CONFDIR were used (in the latter cases, you will have to create the directory).
All configuration files share the same format. For example, a short extract of the main configuration file might look as follows:
# Space-separated list of directories to index.
topdirs = ~/docs /usr/share/doc
[~/somedirectory-with-utf8-txt-files]
defaultcharset = utf-8
There are three kinds of lines:
Comment (starts with #) or empty.
Parameter affectation (name = value).
Section definition ([somedirname]).
Section definitions allow redefining some parameters for a directory sub-tree. They stay in effect until another section definition, or the end of file, is encountered. Some of the parameters used for indexing are looked up hierarchically from the current directory location upwards. Not all parameters can be meaningfully redefined, this is specified for each in the next section.
The tilde character (~) is expanded in file names to the name of the user's home directory.
White space is used for separation inside lists. List elements with embedded spaces can be quoted using double-quotes.
recoll.conf is the main configuration file. It defines things like what to index (top directories and things to ignore), and the default character set to use for document types which do not specify it internally.
The default configuration will index your home directory. If this is not appropriate, start recoll to create a blank configuration, click Cancel, and edit the configuration file before restarting the command. This will start the initial indexing, which may take some time.
Paramers:
Specifies the list of directories or files to index (recursively for directories). The indexer will not follow symbolic links inside the indexed trees. If an entry in the topdirs list is a symbolic link, indexing will not start and will generate an error.
The name of the Xapian data directory. It will be created if needed when the index is initialized. If this is not an absolute path, it will be interpreted relative to the configuration directory. The value can have embedded spaces but starting or trailing spaces will be trimmed. You cannot use quotes here.
A space-separated list of patterns for names of files or directories that should be completely ignored. The list defined in the default file is:
skippedNames = #* bin CVS Cache cache* caughtspam tmp .thumbnails .svn \
*~ recollrc
The list can be redefined for sub-directories, but is only actually changed for the top level ones in topdirs.
The top-level directories are not affected by this list (that is, a directory in topdirs might match and would still be indexed).
The list in the default configuration does not exclude hidden directories (names beginning with a dot), which means that it may index quite a few things that you do not want. On the other hand, mail user agents like thunderbird usually store messages in hidden directories, and you probably want this indexed. One possible solution is to have .* in skippedNames, and add things like ~/.thunderbird or ~/.evolution in topdirs.
A space-separated list of patterns for paths of files or directories that should be skipped. There is no default in the sample configuration file, but the code always adds the configuration and database directories in there.
skippedPaths is used both by batch and real time indexing. daemSkippedPaths can be used to specify things that should be indexed at startup, but not monitored.
Example of use for skipping text files only in a specific directory:
skippedPaths = ~/somedir/*.txt
Verbosity level for recoll and recollindex. A value of 4 lists quite a lot of debug/information messages. 2 only lists errors. The daemversion is specific to the indexing monitor daemon.
Where the messages should go. 'stderr' can be used as a special value, and is the default. The daemversion is specific to the indexing monitor daemon.
A directory to search for the external filter scripts used to index some types of files. The value should not be changed, except if you want to modify one of the default scripts. The value can be redefined for any sub-directory.
A list of languages for which the stem expansion databases will be built. See recollindex(1) for possible values. You can add a stem expansion database for a different language by using recollindex -s, but it will be deleted during the next indexing. Only languages listed in the configuration file are permanent.
The name of the character set used for files that do not contain a character set definition (ie: plain text files). This can be redefined for any sub-directory. If it is not set at all, the character set used is the one defined by the nls environment (LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, LANG), or iso8859-1 if nothing is set.
Decide if we try to guess the character set of files if no internal value is available (ie: for plain text files). This does not work well in general, and should probably not be used.
Decide if we use the file -i system command as a final step for determining the mime type for a file (the main procedure uses suffix associations as defined in the mimemap file). This can be useful for files with suffix-less names, but it will also cause the indexing of many bogus "text" files.
Recoll indexes file names in a special section of the database to allow specific file names searches using wild cards. This parameter decides if file name indexing is performed only for files with mime types that would qualify them for full text indexing, or for all files inside the selected subtrees, independently of mime type.
Recoll stores an abstract for each indexed file inside the database. This is so that they can be displayed inside the result lists without decoding the original file. This parameter defines the size of the stored abstract (which can come from an actual section or just be the beginning of the text). The default value is 250.
The name of the directory where recoll result list icons are stored. You can change this if you want different images.
mimemap specifies the file name extension to mime type mappings.
For file names without an extension, or with an unknown one, the system's file -i command will be executed to determine the mime type (this can be switched off inside the main configuration file).
The mappings can be specified on a per-subtree basis, which may be useful in some cases. Example: gaim logs have a .txt extension but should be handled specially, which is possible because they are usually all located in one place.
mimemap also has a recoll_noindex variable which is a list of suffixes. Matching files will be skipped (which avoids unnecessary decompressions or file executions). This is partially redundant with skippedNames in the main configuration file, with two differences: it will not affect directories, and it cannot be made dependant on the file-system location (it is a configuration-wide parameter). You could accomplish with skippedNames anything that recoll_noindex does. The latter is used mostly for things known to be unindexable by a given Recoll version. Having it there avoids cluttering the more user-oriented and locally customized skippedNames.
mimeconf specifies how the different mime types are handled for indexing, and which icons are displayed in the recoll result lists.
Changing the parameters in the [index] section is probably not a good idea except if you are a Recoll developer.
The [icons] section allows you to change the icons which are displayed by recoll in the result lists (the values are the basenames of the png images inside the iconsdir directory (specified in recoll.conf).
mimeview specifies which programs are started when you click on an Edit link in a result list. Ie: HTML is normally displayed using firefox, but you may prefer Konqueror, your openoffice.org program might be named oofice instead of openoffice etc.
Changes to this file can be done by direct editing, or through the recoll user preferences dialog.
As for the other configuration files, the normal usage is to have a mimeview inside your own configuration directory, with just the non-default entries, which will override those from the central configuration file.
Please note that these entries must be placed under a [view] section.
If Use desktop preferences to choose document editor is checked in the user preferences, all mimeview entries will be ignored except the one labelled application/x-all (which is set to use xdg-open by default).
Imagine that you have some kind of file which does not have indexable content, but for which you would like to have a functional Edit link in the result list (when found by file name). The file names end in .blob and can be displayed by application blobviewer.
You need two entries in the configuration files for this to work:
In $RECOLL_CONFDIR/mimemap (typically ~/.recoll/mimemap), add the following line:
application/x-blobapp = .blob
Note that the mime type is made up here, and you could call it diesel/oil just the same.
In $RECOLL_CONFDIR/mimeview under the [view] section:
application/x-blobapp = blobviewer %f
We are supposing that blobviewer wants a file name parameter here, you would use %u if it liked URLs better.
If you just wanted to change the application used by Recoll to display a mime type which it already knows, you would just need to edit mimeview. The entries you add in your personal file override those in the central configuration, which you do not need to alter
Let us now imagine that the above .blob files actually contain indexable text and that you know how to extract it with a command line program. Getting Recoll to index the files is easy. You need to perform the above alteration, and also to add data to the mimeconf file (typically in ~/.recoll/mimeconf):
Under the [index] section, add the following line (more about the rclblob indexing script later):
application/x-blobapp = exec rclblob
Under the [icons] section, you should choose an icon to be displayed for the files inside the result lists. Icons are normally 64x64 pixels PNG files which live in /usr/[local/]share/recoll/images.
Under the [categories] section, you should add the mime type where it makes sense (you can also create a category). Categories may be used for filtering in advanced search.
The rclblob filter should be an executable program or script which exists inside /usr/[local/]share/recoll/filters. It will be given a file name as argument and should output the text contents in html format on the standard output.
The html could be very minimal like the following example:
<html><head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<body>some text content</body></html>
You should take care to escape some characters inside the text by transforming them into appropriate entities. "&" should be transformed into "&", "<" should be transformed into "<".
The character set needs to be specified in the header. It does not need to be UTF-8 (Recoll will take care of translating it), but it must be accurate for good results.
Recoll will also make use of other header fields if they are present: title, description, keywords.
The easiest way to write a new filter is probably to start from an existing one.