3.12. Customizing the search interface

You can customize some aspects of the search interface by using the Query configuration entry in the Preferences menu.

There are several tabs in the dialog, dealing with the interface itself, the parameters used for searching and returning results, and what indexes are searched.

User interface parameters:



Search parameters:



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. An alternative indexer may also need to implement a way of purging the index from stale data,

3.12.1. The result list paragraph format

The presentation of each result inside the result list can be customized by setting the result list paragraph format inside the User Interface tab of the Query configuration.

This is a Qt HTML string where the following printf-like % substitutions will be performed:

The format of the Preview and Edit links is <a href="P%N"> and <a href="E%N"> where docnum (%N expands to the document number inside the result list).

In addition to the predefined values above, all strings like %(fieldname) will be replaced by the value of the field named fieldname for this document. Only stored fields can be accessed in this way, the value of indexed but not stored fields is not known at this point in the search process (see field configuration). There are currently very few fields stored by default, apart from the values above (only author), so this feature will need some custom local configuration to be useful. For example, you could look at the fields for the document types of interest (use the right-click menu inside the preview window), and add what you want to the list of stored fields. A candidate example would be the recipient field which is generated by the message filters.

The default value for the paragraph format string is:

<img src="%I" align="left">%R %S %L &nbsp;&nbsp;<b>%T</b><br>
%M&nbsp;%D&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<i>%U</i>&nbsp;%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
       
Or the clean looking:
<img src="%I" align="left">%L <font color="#900000">%R</font>
  <b>%T</b><br>%S 
<font color="#808080"><i>%U</i></font>
<table bgcolor="#e0e0e0">
<tr><td><div>%A</div></td></tr>
</table>%K
       
Note that the P%N link in the above paragraph makes the title a preview link.

Due to the way the program handles right mouse clicks in the result list, if the custom formatting results in multiple paragraphs per result, right clicks will only work inside the first one.