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.
Number of results in a result page:
Hide duplicate results: decides if result list entries are shown for identical documents found in different places.
Highlight color for query terms: Terms from the user query are highlighted in the result list samples and the preview window. The color can be chosen here. Any Qt color string should work (ie red, #ff0000). The default is blue.
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 described in its own section.
Maximum text size highlighted for preview Inserting highlights on search term inside the text before inserting it in the preview window involves quite a lot of processing, and can be disabled over the given text size to speed up loading.
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.
Choose editor applications this will let you choose the command started by the Edit links inside the result list, for specific document types.
Display category filter as toolbar... this will let you choose if the document categories are displayed as a list or a set of buttons.
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.
Remember sort activation state if set, Recoll will remember the sort tool stat between invocations. It normally starts with sorting disabled.
Prefer HTML to plain text for preview if set, Recoll will display HTML as such inside the preview window. If this causes problems with the Qt HTML display, you can uncheck it to display the plain text version instead.
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 add phrase to simple searches: a phrase will be automatically built and added to simple searches when looking for Any terms. This will give a relevance boost to the results where the search terms appear as a phrase (consecutive and in order).
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.
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.
Synthetic abstract size: adjust to taste...
Synthetic abstract context words: how many words should be displayed around each term occurrence.
Query language magic file name suffixes: a list of words which automatically get turned into ext:xxx file name suffix clauses when starting a query language query (ie: doc xls xlsx...). This will save some typing for people who use file types a lot when querying.
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,
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:
%A. Abstract
%D. Date
%I. Icon image name
%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
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 <b>%T</b><br> %M %D <i>%U</i> %i<br> %A %KYou 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> - %LOr 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>%KNote 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.