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 first want to customize the configuration 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 configuration files. 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 file types (ie: postscript, pdf, ms-word, rtf ...) need external applications for preprocessing. The list is in the installation section. After every indexing operation, Recoll updates a list of commands that would be needed for indexing existing files types. This list can be displayed from the recoll File menu. It is stored in the missing text file inside the configuration directory.
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.
If your first installation of Recoll was 1.9.0 or more recent, you can skip this section.
Xapian has had two possible index formats for quite some time. The "old" one named Quartz, and the new one named Flint. Xapian 0.9 used Quartz by default, but could use Flint if a specific environment variable (XAPIAN_PREFER_FLINT) was set. Xapian 1.0 still supports Quartz but will use Flint by default for new index creations.
The number of disk accesses performed during indexing has been much optimized in the new Flint engine and you may see indexing times improved by 50% in some cases (compared to Quartz), typically for big indexes where disk accesses dominate the indexing time. There is also a more modest improvement of index size.
Xapian will not convert automatically an existing index from the Quartz to the Flint format. If you have an older index and want to take advantage of the new format (which can be done without setting the environment variable as of Recoll 1.8.2 and Xapian 1.0.0), you will have to explicitely delete the old index, then run a normal indexing process.
Unfortunately, using the -z option to recollindex is not sufficient to change the format, you have to delete all files inside the index directory (typically ~/.recoll/xapiandb) before starting indexing.
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, set the directory and files access modes appropriately, and also maybe adjust the umask used during index updates.
Variables set inside the Recoll configuration files control which areas of the file system are indexed, and how files are processed. These variables can be set either by editing the text files or using the dialogs in the recoll GUI.
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, but the most current information will most likely be the comments inside the sample file. 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
Most parameters for a given indexing configuration can be set from a recoll GUI running on this configuration (either as default, or by setting RECOLL_CONFDIR or the -c option.)
The interface is started from the Preferences menu. It has two main panels. The first panel allows setting global variables, like the list of top directories or the list of skipped paths. The second panel allows setting variables that can be redefined for subdirectories. This second panel has an initially empty list of customisation directories, to which you can add. The variables are then set for the currently selected directory (or at the top level if the empty line is selected).
The meaning for most entries in the interface is self-evident and documented by a ToolTip popup on the text label. For more detail, you will need to refer to the configuration section of this guide.
The configuration tool normally respects the comments and most of the formatting inside the configuration file, so that it is quite possible to use it on hand-edited files, which you might nevertheless want to backup first...
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 the RECOLL_CONFDIR variable or accept a -c confdir option to specify a non-default configuration directory.
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. Also, monitoring large file trees by itself significantly taxes system resources. 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 main user interface for searching. It is based on the QT library.
recoll has two search modes:
Simple search (the default, on the main screen) has a single entry field where you can enter multiple words.
Advanced search (a panel accessed through the Tools menu or the toolbox bar icon) shas multiple entry fields, which you may use to build a logical condition, with additional filtering on file type and location in the file system.
In most cases, you can enter the terms as you think them, even if they contain embedded punctuation or other non-textual characters. For exemple, Recoll can handle things like e-mail addresses, or arbitrary cut and paste from another text window, punctation and all.
The main case where you should enter text differently from how it is printed is for east-asian languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean). Words composed of single or multiple characters should be entered separated by white space in this case (they would typically be printed without white space).
Start the recoll program.
Possibly choose a search mode: Any term, All terms, File name or Query language.
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 entry will be split at white space characters, and each pattern will be separately expanded. If you want to search for a pattern including white space, you need to use double quotes. The point of having a separate file name search is that wild card expansion can be performed more efficiently on a relatively small subset of the index.
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. Sstemming 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 editor. The editors 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 editor 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).
The format of the result list entries is entirely configurable by using the preference dialog to edit an HTML fragment.
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
Save to File
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.
Save to File allows saving the contents of a result document to a chosen file. This entry will only appear if the document does not correspond to an existing file, but is a subdocument inside such a file (ie: an email attachment). It is especially useful to extract attachments with no associated editor.
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.
A right-click menu in the text area allows switching between displaying the main text or the contents of fields associated to the document (ie: author, abtract, etc.). This is especially useful in cases where the term match did not occur in the main text but in one of the fields.
The query language processor is activated on the simple search entry when the search mode selector is set to Query Language.
The language is roughly based on the Xesam user search language specification.
Here follows a sample request that we are going to explain:
author:"john doe" Beatles OR Lennon Live OR Unplugged -potatoes
This would search for all documents with John Doe appearing as a phrase in the author field (exactly what this is would depend on the document type, ie: the From: header, for an email message), and containing either beatles or lennon and either live or unplugged but not potatoes (in any part of the document).
An element is composed of an optional field specification, and a value, separated by a colon. Exemple: Beatles, author:balzac, dc:title:grandet
The colon, if present, means "contains". Xesam defines other relations, which are not supported for now.
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 element preceded by a - specifies a term that should not appear. Pure negative queries are forbidden.
As usual, words inside quotes define a phrase (the order of words is significant), so that title:"prejudice pride" is not the same as title:prejudice title:pride, and is unlikely to find a result.
Recoll currently manages the following default 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.
recipient or to for searching the documents recipients.
keyword for searching the document-specified keywords (few documents actually have any).
filename for the document's file name.
ext specifies the file name extension (Ex: ext:html)
The field syntax also supports a few field-like, but special, criteria:
dir for filtering the results on file location (Ex: dir:/home/me/somedir). Please note that this is quite inefficient, that it may produce very slow searches, and that it may be worth in some cases to set up separate databases instead.
mime or format for specifying the mime type. This one is quite special because you can specify several values which will be OR'ed (the normal default for the language is AND). Ex: mime:text/plain mime:text/html. Specifying an explicit boolean operator or negation (-) before a mime specification is not supported and will produce strange results.
type or rclcat for specifying the category (as in text/media/presentation/etc.). The classification of mime types in categories is defined in the Recoll configuration (mimeconf), and can be modified or extended. The default category names are those which permit filtering results in the main GUI screen. Categories are OR'ed like mime types above.
The document filters used while indexing have the possibility to create other fields with arbitrary names, and aliases may be defined in the configuration, so that the exact field search possibilities may be different for you if someone took care of the customisation.
The query language is currently the only way to use the Recoll field search capability.
Words inside phrases and capitalized words are not stem-expanded. Wildcards may be used anywhere inside a term. Specifying a wild-card on the left of a term can produce a very slow search (or even an incorrect one if the expansion is truncated because of excessive size).
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.
Most Xesam phrase modifiers are unsupported, except for l (small ell) to disable stemming, and p to turn an phrase into a NEAR (unordered) search. Exemple: "prejudice pride"p
The advanced search dialog helps you build more complex queries. It can be opened through the Tools menu or through the main toolbar.
The dialog has three parts:
The top part allows constructing a query by combining multiple clauses of different types. 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.
Additional entry fields can be created by clicking the Add clause button.
When searching, the non-empty clauses will be combined either with an AND or an OR conjunction, depending on the choice made on the left (All clauses or Any clause).
Entries of all types except "Phrase" and "Near" accept a mix of single words and phrases enclosed in double quotes. Stemming and wildcard expansion will be performed as for simple search.
The next part allows filtering the results by their mime types.
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).
The bottom part allows restricting 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.
Phrases and Proximity searches. These two clauses work in similar ways, with the difference that proximity searches do not impose an order on the words. In both cases, an adjustable number (slack) of non-matched words may be accepted between the searched ones (use the counter on the left to adjust this count). For phrases, the default count is zero (exact match). For proximity it is ten (meaning that two search terms, would be matched if found within a window of twelve words). Examples: a phrase search for quick fox with a slack of 0 will match quick fox but not quick brown fox. With a slack of 1 it will match the latter, but not fox quick. A proximity search for quick fox with the default slack will match the latter, and also a fox is a cunning and quick animal.
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 (if your documents contain non-ascii characters, Recoll needs an aspell version newer than 0.60 for UTF-8 support). 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.
You can erase the document history by using the Erase document history entry in the File menu.
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.
Sort parameters are remembered between program invocations, but result sorting is normally always inactive when the program starts. It is possible to keep the sorting activation state between program invocations by checking the Remember sort activation state option in the preferences.
It is also possible to hide duplicate entries inside the result list (documents with the exact same contents as the displayed one). The test of identity is based on an MD5 hash of the document container, not only of the text contents (so that ie, a text document with an image added will not be a duplicate of the text only). Duplicates hiding is controlled by an entry in the Query configuration dialog, and is off by default.
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.
Wildcards. Wildcards can be used inside search terms in all forms of searches. More about wildcards.
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.
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 may be faster than the generic search especially when using wildcards.
Phrases and Proximity searches. 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 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).
AutoPhrases. 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.
Using fields. You can use the query language and field specifications to only search certain parts of documents. This can be especially helpful with email, for example only searching emails from a specific originator: search tips from:helpfulgui
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.
Browsing the result list inside a preview window. 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. 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.
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:
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 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
<img src="%I" align="left">%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
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
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. Please note that, 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.
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.
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. An alternative indexer may also need to implement a way of purging the index from stale data,
The Recoll KIO slave allows performing a Recoll search by entering an appropriate URL in a KDE open dialog, or with an HTML-based interface displayed in Konqueror.
The HTML-based interface is similar to the QT-based interface, but slightly less powerful for now. Its advantage is that you can perform your search while staying fully within the KDE framework: drag and drop from the result list works normally and you have your normal choice of applications for opening files.
The alternative interface uses a directory view of search results. Due to limitations in the current KIO slave interface, it is currently not obviously useful (to me).
The interface is described in more detail inside a help file which you can access by entering recoll:/ inside the konqueror URL line (this works only if the recoll KIO slave has been previously installed).
The instructions for building this module are located in the source tree. See: kde/kio/recoll/00README.txt
As a sample application, the Recoll KIO slave could allow preparing a set of HTML documents (for example a manual) so that they become their own search interface inside konqueror.
This can be done by either explicitely inserting <a href="recoll:/..."> links around some document areas, or automatically by adding a very small javascript program to the documents, like the following example, which would initiate a search by double-clicking any term:
<script language="JavaScript">
function recollsearch() {
var t = document.getSelection();
window.location.href = 'recoll://search/query?qtp=a&p=0&q=' +
encodeURIComponent(t);
}
</script>
....
<body ondblclick="recollsearch()">
There are several ways to obtain search results as a text stream, without a graphical interface:
By passing option -t to the recoll program.
By using the recollq program.
By writing a custom Python program, using the Recoll Python API.
The first two methods work in the same way and accept/need the same arguments (except for the additional -t to recoll). The query to be executed is specified as command line arguments.
recollq is not built by default. You can use the Makefile in the query directory to build it. This is a very simple program, and it will often be useful to taylor its output format to your needs.
recollq has a man page (not installed by default, look in the doc/man directory). The Usage string is as follows:
recollq [-o|-a|-f] <query string>
Runs a recoll query and displays result lines.
Default: will interpret the argument(s) as a query language string
-o Emulate the gui simple search in ANY TERM mode
-a Emulate the gui simple search in ALL TERMS mode
-f Emulate the gui simple search in filename mode
Common options:
-c <configdir> : specify config directory, overriding $RECOLL_CONFDIR
-d also dump file contents
-n <cnt> limit the maximum number of results (0->no limit, default 2000)
-b : basic. Just output urls, no mime types or titles
-m : dump the whole document meta[] array
-S fld : sort by field name
-D : sort descending
Sample execution:
recollq 'ilur -nautique mime:text/html' Recoll query: ((((ilur:(wqf=11) OR ilurs) AND_NOT (nautique:(wqf=11) OR nautiques OR nautiqu OR nautiquement)) FILTER Ttext/html)) 4 results text/html [file:///Users/uncrypted-dockes/projets/bateaux/ilur/comptes.html] [comptes.html] 18593 bytes text/html [file:///Users/uncrypted-dockes/projets/nautique/webnautique/articles/ilur1/index.html] [Constructio... text/html [file:///Users/uncrypted-dockes/projets/pagepers/index.html] [psxtcl/writemime/recoll]... text/html [file:///Users/uncrypted-dockes/projets/bateaux/ilur/factEtCie/recu-chasse-maree....
Recoll has an Application programming Interface, usable both for indexing and searching, currently accessible from the Python language.
Another less radical way to extend the application is to write filters for new types of documents.
The processing of metadata attributes for documents (fields) is highly configurable.
Recoll filters are executable programs which translate from a specific format (ie: openoffice, acrobat, etc.) to the Recoll indexing input format, which may be text/plain or text/html.
Recoll filters are usually shell-scripts, but this is in no way necessary. These programs are extremely simple and most of the difficulty lies in extracting the text from the native format, not outputting what is expected by Recoll. Happily enough, most document formats already have translators or text extractors which handle the difficult part and can be called from the filter. In some case the output of the translating program is appropriate, and no intermediate shell-script is needed.
Filters are called with a single argument which is the source file name. They should output the result to stdout.
The RECOLL_FILTER_FORPREVIEW environment variable (values yes, no) tells the filter if the operation is for indexing or previewing. Some filters use this to output a slightly different format. This is not essential.
The association of file types to filters is performed in the mimeconf file. A sample:
[index]
application/msword = exec antiword -t -i 1 -m UTF-8;\
mimetype=text/plain;charset=utf-8
application/ogg = exec rclogg
text/rtf = exec unrtf --nopict --html; charset=iso-8859-1; mimetype=text/html
The fragment specifies that:
application/msword files are processed by executing the antiword program, which outputs text/plain encoded in iso-8859-1.
application/ogg files are processed by the rclogg script, with default output type (text/html, with encoding specified in the header, or utf-8 by default).
text/rtf is processed by unrtf, which outputs text/html. The iso-8859-1 encoding is specified because it is not the utf-8 default, and not output by unrtf in the HTML header section.
The easiest way to write a new filter is probably to start from an existing one.
Filters which output text/plain text are generally simpler, but they cannot specify the character set and other metadata, so they are limited to cases where these elements are not needed.
The output 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 "<". This is not always properly done by translating programs which output HTML, and of course nerver by those which output plain text.
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.
Filters also have the possibility to "invent" field names. This should be output as meta tags:
<meta name="somefield" content="Some textual data" />
See the following section for details about configuring how field data is processed by the indexer.
Fields are named pieces of information in or about documents, like title, author, abstract.
The field values for documents can appear in several ways during indexing: either output by filters as meta fields in the HTML header section, or added as attributes of the Doc object when using the API, or again synthetized internally by Recoll.
The Recoll query language allows searching for text in a specific field.
Recoll defines a number of default fields. Additional ones can be output by filters, and described in the fields configuration file.
Fields can be:
indexed, meaning that their terms are separately stored in inverted lists (with a specific prefix), and that a field-specific search is possible.
stored, meaning that their value is recorded in the index data record for the document, and can be returned and displayed with search results.
A field can be either or both indexed and stored.
A field becomes indexed by having a prefix defined in the [prefixes] section of the fields file. See the comments in there for details
A field becomes stored by appearing in the [stored] section of the fields file.
A few elements in the interface are specific and and need an explanation.
An udi (unique document identifier) identifies a document. Because of limitations inside the index engine, it is restricted in length (to 200 bytes), which is why a regular URI cannot be used. The structure and contents of the udi is defined by the application and opaque to the index engine. For example, the internal file system indexer uses the complete document path (file path + internal path), truncated to length, the suppressed part being replaced by a hash value.
This data value (set as a field in the Doc object) is stored, along with the URL, but not indexed by Recoll. Its contents are not interpreted, and its use is up to the application. For example, the Recoll internal file system indexer stores the part of the document access path internal to the container file (ipath in this case is a list of subdocument sequential numbers). url and ipath are returned in every search result and permit access to the original document.
The fields file inside the Recoll configuration defines which document fields are either "indexed" (searchable), "stored" (retrievable with search results), or both.
Data for an external indexer, should be stored in a separate index, not the one for the Recoll internal file system indexer, except if the latter is not used at all). The reason is that the main document indexer purge pass would remove all the other indexer's documents, as they were not seen during indexing. The main indexer documents would also probably be a problem for the external indexer purge operation.
Recoll versions after 1.11 define a Python programming interface, both for searching and indexing.
The python interface is not built by default and can be found in the source package, under python/recoll. The directory contains the usual setup.py script which you can use to build and install the module:
cd recoll-xxx/python/recoll
python setup.py build
python setup.py install
NAME
recoll - This is an interface to the Recoll full text indexer.
FILE
/usr/local/lib/python2.5/site-packages/recoll.so
CLASSES
Db
Doc
Query
SearchData
class Db(__builtin__.object)
| Db([confdir=None], [extra_dbs=None], [writable = False])
|
| A Db object holds a connection to a Recoll index. Use the connect()
| function to create one.
| confdir specifies a Recoll configuration directory (default:
| $RECOLL_CONFDIR or ~/.recoll).
| extra_dbs is a list of external databases (xapian directories)
| writable decides if we can index new data through this connection
|
| Methods defined here:
|
|
| addOrUpdate(...)
| addOrUpdate(udi, doc, parent_udi=None) -> None
| Add or update index data for a given document
| The udi string must define a unique id for the document. It is not
| interpreted inside Recoll
| doc is a Doc object
| if parent_udi is set, this is a unique identifier for the
| top-level container (ie mbox file)
|
| delete(...)
| delete(udi) -> Bool.
| Purge index from all data for udi. If udi matches a container
| document, purge all subdocs (docs with a parent_udi matching udi).
|
| makeDocAbstract(...)
| makeDocAbstract(Doc, Query) -> string
| Build and return 'keyword-in-context' abstract for document
| and query.
|
| needUpdate(...)
| needUpdate(udi, sig) -> Bool.
| Check if the index is up to date for the document defined by udi,
| having the current signature sig.
|
| purge(...)
| purge() -> Bool.
| Delete all documents that were not touched during the just finished
| indexing pass (since open-for-write). These are the documents for
| the needUpdate() call was not performed, indicating that they no
| longer exist in the primary storage system.
|
| query(...)
| query() -> Query. Return a new, blank query object for this index.
|
| setAbstractParams(...)
| setAbstractParams(maxchars, contextwords).
| Set the parameters used to build 'keyword-in-context' abstracts
|
| ----------------------------------------------------------------------
| Data and other attributes defined here:
|
class Doc(__builtin__.object)
| Doc()
|
| A Doc object contains index data for a given document.
| The data is extracted from the index when searching, or set by the
| indexer program when updating. The Doc object has no useful methods but
| many attributes to be read or set by its user. It matches exactly the
| Rcl::Doc c++ object. Some of the attributes are predefined, but,
| especially when indexing, others can be set, the name of which will be
| processed as field names by the indexing configuration.
| Inputs can be specified as unicode or strings.
| Outputs are unicode objects.
| All dates are specified as unix timestamps, printed as strings
| Predefined attributes (index/query/both):
| text (index): document plain text
| url (both)
| fbytes (both) optional) file size in bytes
| filename (both)
| fmtime (both) optional file modification date. Unix time printed
| as string
| dbytes (both) document text bytes
| dmtime (both) document creation/modification date
| ipath (both) value private to the app.: internal access path
| inside file
| mtype (both) mime type for original document
| mtime (query) dmtime if set else fmtime
| origcharset (both) charset the text was converted from
| size (query) dbytes if set, else fbytes
| sig (both) app-defined file modification signature.
| For up to date checks
| relevancyrating (query)
| abstract (both)
| author (both)
| title (both)
| keywords (both)
|
| Methods defined here:
|
|
| ----------------------------------------------------------------------
| Data and other attributes defined here:
|
class Query(__builtin__.object)
| Recoll Query objects are used to execute index searches.
| They must be created by the Db.query() method.
|
| Methods defined here:
|
|
| execute(...)
| execute(query_string, stemming=1|0)
|
| Starts a search for query_string, a Recoll search language string
| (mostly Xesam-compatible).
| The query can be a simple list of terms (and'ed by default), or more
| complicated with field specs etc. See the Recoll manual.
|
| executesd(...)
| executesd(SearchData)
|
| Starts a search for the query defined by the SearchData object.
|
| fetchone(...)
| fetchone(None) -> Doc
|
| Fetches the next Doc object in the current search results.
|
| sortby(...)
| sortby(field=fieldname, ascending=true)
| Sort results by 'fieldname', in ascending or descending order.
| Only one field can be used, no subsorts for now.
| Must be called before executing the search
|
| ----------------------------------------------------------------------
| Data descriptors defined here:
|
| next
| Next index to be fetched from results. Normally increments after
| each fetchone() call, but can be set/reset before the call effect
| seeking. Starts at 0
|
| ----------------------------------------------------------------------
| Data and other attributes defined here:
|
class SearchData(__builtin__.object)
| SearchData()
|
| A SearchData object describes a query. It has a number of global
| parameters and a chain of search clauses.
|
| Methods defined here:
|
|
| addclause(...)
| addclause(type='and'|'or'|'excl'|'phrase'|'near'|'sub',
| qstring=string, slack=int, field=string, stemming=1|0,
| subSearch=SearchData)
| Adds a simple clause to the SearchData And/Or chain, or a subquery
| defined by another SearchData object
|
| ----------------------------------------------------------------------
| Data and other attributes defined here:
|
FUNCTIONS
connect(...)
connect([confdir=None], [extra_dbs=None], [writable = False])
-> Db.
Connects to a Recoll database and returns a Db object.
confdir specifies a Recoll configuration directory
(the default is built like for any Recoll program).
extra_dbs is a list of external databases (xapian directories)
writable decides if we can index new data through this connection
The following sample would query the index with a user language string. See the python/samples directory inside the Recoll source for other examples.
#!/usr/bin/env python
import recoll
db = recoll.connect()
db.setAbstractParams(maxchars=80, contextwords=2)
query = db.query()
nres = query.execute("some user question")
print "Result count: ", nres
if nres > 5:
nres = 5
while query.next >= 0 and query.next < nres:
doc = query.fetchone()
print query.next
for k in ("title", "size"):
print k, ":", getattr(doc, k).encode('utf-8')
abs = db.makeDocAbstract(doc, query).encode('utf-8')
print abs
print
Recoll binary packages from the Recoll web site 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, and maybe have a look at the configuration section (but this may not be necessary for a quick test with default parameters).
If you use a BSD-type port system or a prebuilt package (RPM or other), just follow the usual procedure for your system.
The unpackaged binary versions on the Recoll web site 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).
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.
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).
After an indexing pass, the commands that were found missing can be displayed from the recoll File menu. The list is stored in the missing text file inside the configuration directory.
A list of common file types which need external commands:
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.
Wordperfect files: libwpd.
RTF: unrtf
TeX: Recoll uses the untex program. Your distribution may have a package for it. If it doesn't, there is a copy of the source on the Recoll web site, because the program has no obvious home. The filter can also work with detex and will use it if it is installed.
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.
Pictures: Recoll uses the Exiftool Perl package to extract tag information. Most image file formats are supported.
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 1.9 normally uses version 1.0.2, but any 0.9 or 1.0.x version will work too), 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 3/4/5/6), FreeBSD 5/6, macosx, and Solaris 8. If you build on another system, and need to modify things, 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.
Recoll indexing options are set inside text configuration files located in a configuration directory. There can be several such directories, each of which define the parameters for one index.
The configuration files can be edited by hand or through the Indexing configuration dialog (Preferences menu). The GUI tool will try to respect your formatting and comments as much as possible, so it is quite possible to use both ways.
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.
For each index, there are two sets of configuration files. System-wide configuration files are kept in a directory named like /usr/[local/]share/recoll/examples, and define default values, shared by all indexes. For each index, a parallel set of files defines the customized parameters.
The default location of the configuration is the .recoll directory in your home. Most people will only use this directory.
This location can be changed, or others can be added 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.
When found at the beginning of a file path, the tilde character (~) is expanded to the name of the user's home directory, as a shell would do.
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 by default (see the followLinks options though).
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.
Not even the file names are indexed for patterns in this list. See the recoll_noindex variable in mimemap for an alternative approach which indexes the file names.
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
Specifies if the indexer should follow symbolic links while walking the file tree. The default is to ignore symbolic links to avoid multiple indexing of linked files. No effort is made to avoid duplication when this option is set to true. This option can be set individually for each of the topdirs members by using sections. It can not be changed below the topdirs level.
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 list of languages for which the stem expansion databases will be built. See recollindex(1) or use the recollindex -l command 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.
Maximum file system occupation before we stop indexing. The value is a percentage, corresponding to what the "Capacity" df output column shows. The default value is 0, meaning no checking.
Threshold (megabytes of new text data) where we flush from memory to disk index. Setting this can help control memory usage. A value of 0 means no explicit flushing, letting Xapian use its own default, which is flushing every 10000 documents (memory usage depends on average document size). The default value is 10.
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.
The name of the directory where recoll result list icons are stored. You can change this if you want different images.
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 normally indexes any file which it knows how to read. This list lets you restrict the indexed mime types to what you specify. If the variable is unspecified or the list empty (the default), all supported types are processed.
Size limit for compressed (.gz or .bz2) files. These need to be decompressed in a temporary directory for identification, which can be very wasteful if 'uninteresting' big compressed files are present. Negative means no limit, 0 means no processing of any compressed file. Defaults to -1.
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. The text can come from an actual 'abstract' section in the document or will just be the beginning of the document. It is stored in the index so that it can be displayed inside the result lists without decoding the original file. The idxabsmlen parameter defines the size of the stored abstract. The default value is 250 bytes. The search interface gives you the choice to display this stored text or a synthetic abstract built by extracting text around the search terms. If you always prefer the synthetic abstract, you can reduce this value and save a little space.
Language definitions to use when creating the aspell dictionary. The value must match a set of aspell language definition files. You can type "aspell config" to see where these are installed (look for data-dir). The default if the variable is not set is to use your desktop national language environment to guess the value.
If this is set, the aspell dictionary generation is turned off. Useful for cases where you don't need the functionality or when it is unusable because aspell crashes during dictionary generation.
If this set to true, specific east asian (Chinese Korean Japanese) characters/word splitting is turned off. This will save a small amount of cpu if you have no CJK documents. If your document base does include such text but you are not interested in searching it, setting nocjk may be a significant time and space saver.
This lets you adjust the size of n-grams used for indexing CJK text. The default value of 2 is probably appropriate in most cases. A value of 3 would allow more precision and efficiency on longer words, but the index will be approximately twice as large.
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 a few differences: it will not affect directories, it cannot be made dependant on the file-system location (it is a configuration-wide parameter), and the file names will still be indexed (not even the file names are indexed for patterns in skippedNames. recoll_noindex 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 on the standard output.
The filter programming section describes in more detail how to write a filter.
The Recoll source tree contains the source code to the recoll_applet, a small application derived from the find_applet. This can be used to add a small Recoll launcher to the KDE panel.
The applet is not automatically built with the main Recoll programs, nor is it included with the main source distribution (because the KDE build boilerplate makes it relatively big). You can download its source from the recoll.org download page. Use the omnipotent configure;make;make install incantation to build and install.
You can then add the applet to the panel by right-clicking the panel and choosing the Add applet entry.
The recoll_applet has a small text window where you can type a Recoll query (in query language form), and an icon which can be used to restrict the search to certain types of files. It is quite primitive, and launches a new recoll GUI instance every time (even if it is already running). You may find it useful anyway.