Recoll is a text search tool for Unix and Linux desktops.

Recoll finds keywords inside documents as well as file names.

It can search any document format.
It can reach any storage place: files, archive members, email attachments, transparently handling decompression.
One click will open the document inside a native editor or display an even quicker text preview.
The software is free, open source, and licensed under the GPL.
Detailed features.

The current Recoll version is 1.17.3 (Release notes).

Recoll is based on the very strong Xapian search engine library, for which it provides a powerful text extraction layer and a complete, yet easy to use, Qt graphical interface.

Recoll will index an MS-Word document stored as an attachment to an e-mail message inside a Thunderbird folder archived in a Zip file (and more...). It will also help you search for it with a friendly and powerful interface, and let you open a copy of the file with a single mouse click. There is little that will remain hidden on your disk. More details …

If you have problems with Recoll, documentation and support are available.

Recoll user ? Maybe there are still a few useful search tricks that you don't know about. A quick look at the search tips might prove useful ! Also the Faqs and Howtos on bitbucket.org, and some contributed result list formats.

News

2012-10-25: a problem with a simple workaround has caused several reported recollindex crashes recently. If you store and index Mozilla/Thunderbird email out of the standard location (~/.thunderbird), you should add the following at the end of your configuration file (e.g.: ~/.recoll/recoll.conf):
```
              [/path/to/my/mozilla/mail]
              mhmboxquirks = tbird
          
```
Adjust the path to your local value of course... Without this hint, recollindex has trouble finding the message delimiters inside the folder files, and will possibly use all the computer's memory and crash. Apart from crashes, which only occur for very big folders, this also causes incorrect mail indexing.
2012-10-19: the source for recoll 1.18.001 is available, and this is a call to volunteers to test it. There are binary packages for Ubuntu and Mint Linux users, and I can build others. See this message for more information.
2012-10-16: new filter for EPUB documents.
2012-10-16: recoll 1.18 will soon be out. It will have optional character case and diacritics sensitivity, direct access to hit page when opening PDF files, complex search history, and a host of other smaller improvements. You can already see the release notes and the snapshot currently on the "experimental" Ubuntu PPA is actually a release candidate, so Ubuntu users can take an early plunge...
2012-09-21: an easy way to extend the "Beagle queue" Recoll web history indexing mechanism to other browsers than Firefox (Elinks in this case).
2012-09-13: the next Recoll version will maybe acquire switchable case and diacritics sensitivity. I am writing a few pages about the issues involved, they are referenced from my google+ profile
2012-09-11: a new user-contributed script for those who use real-time indexing on laptops: stop or start indexing according to AC power status. See the details on the Wiki.
2012-06-19: update info. If you are not running Recoll 1.17.3, you probably should. 1.17.2 and older versions have a bug which can cause a crash of the indexing process while processing email, under relatively common conditions.
Also, if you are already running 1.17.3, you may want to install the updated open/libre-office filter described just below.
2012-06-01: an updated filter for the OpenDocument format will properly handle exported Google Docs files.
2012-05-25: a new filter for indexing tar archives.
2012-05-23: Release 1.17.3 mostly fixes an indexing crash that sometimes occurred while processing email. See the Release notes.
2012-04-07: we now have a Chinese user manual: Recoll现在有中文手册咯： Recoll中文手册，HTML
2012-03-27: Recoll gets a Ubuntu Unity Lens. If you are running an Ubuntu release where this makes sense, you can install the recoll-lens package from the Recoll PPA. The Lens uses the Recoll GUI as a proxy to extract and display embedded documents, which native utilities can't reach directly. And of course you still need to run the GUI (or the command line recollindex) to get the indexing going !
2012-03-24: Release 1.17 is out, see the Release notes.
2011-11-26: the result list glitch: ennoying and easily worked-around: it will sometimes happen (for a yet undetermined reason) that the result list paragraph format stored in the Qt preferences file will get garbled, causing result lists with no displayed paragraphs (the counts and pages are ok, the results can be seen in table mode, but not in list mode). The workaround is to go to
Preferences->Query configuration->User interface
and erase the result paragraph format string (^A DEL in the text area), this will reset the string to the default value.

Thanks

Recoll borrows a lot of code from other packages, and welcomes code and ideas from contributors, see some of the Credits.

On the side

We rent a big country house in the Aude area, in the south of France (see map on the site). If you are looking for a wonderful country place with a pool to spend holidays with a big bunch of family and/or friends in a nice historical but very quiet area, this may be it.