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                               Recoll user manual

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                          4.4. Configuration overview

   There are two sets of configuration files. The system-wide files are kept

   in a directory named like /usr/[local/]share/recoll/examples, they define

   default values for the system. A parallel set of files exists by default

   in the .recoll directory in your home. This directory can be changed with

   the RECOLL_CONFDIR environment variable or the -c option parameter to

   recoll and recollindex.

   If the .recoll directory does not exist when recoll or recollindex are

   started, it will be created with a set of empty configuration files.

   recoll will give you a chance to edit the configuration file before

   starting indexing. recollindex will proceed immediately.

   Most of the parameters specific to the recoll GUI are set through the

   Preferences menu and stored in the standard QT place ($HOME/.qt/recollrc).

   You probably do not want to edit this by hand.

   For other options, Recoll uses text configuration files. You will have to

   edit them by hand for now (there is still some hope for a GUI

   configuration tool in the future). The most accurate documentation for the

   configuration parameters is given by comments inside the default files,

   and we will just give a general overview here.

   All configuration files share the same format. For exemple, 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 lines allow redefining some parameters for a directory subtree.

   Some of the parameters used for indexing are looked up hierarchically from

   the more to the less specific. Not all parameters can be meaningfully

   redefined, this is specified for each in the next section.

   The tilde character (~) is expanded in file names to the name of the

   user's home directory.

   White space is used for separation inside lists. Elements with embedded

   spaces can be quoted using double-quotes.

4.4.1. Main configuration file

   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:

   topdirs

           Specifies the list of directories or files to index (recursively

           for directories). The indexer will not follow symbolic links

           inside the indexed trees. If an entry in the topdirs list is a

           symbolic link, indexing will not start and will generate an error.

   dbdir

           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.

   skippedNames

           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:

 *~ #* bin CVS  Cache caughtspam  tmp

           The list can be redefined for subdirectories, 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.

   loglevel

           Verbosity level for recoll and recollindex. A value of 4 lists

           quite a lot of debug/information messages. 2 only lists errors.

   logfilename

           Where the messages should go. 'stderr' can be used as a special

           value, and is the default.

   filtersdir

           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 subdirectory.

   indexstemminglanguages

           A list of languages for which the stem expansion databases will be

           built. See recollindex(1) for possible values. You can add a stem

           expansion database for a different language by using recollindex

           -s, but it will be deleted during the next indexing. Only

           languages listed in the configuration file are permanent.

   defaultcharset

           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 subdirectory. 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.

   guesscharset

           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.

   usesystemfilecommand

           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 suffixless names, but it will also cause the

           indexing of many bogus "text" files.

   indexallfilenames

           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,

           independant of mime type.

   idxabsmlen

           Recoll stores an abstract for each indexed file inside the

           database. This is so that they can be displayed inside the result

           lists without decoding the original file. This parameter defines

           the size of the stored abstract (which can come from an actual

           section or just be the beginning of the text). The default value

           is 250.

   iconsdir

           The name of the directory where recoll result list icons are

           stored. You can change this if you want different images.

4.4.2. The mimemap file

   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 (avoids unnecessary decompressions or file

   executions). This is partially redundant with skippedNames in the main

   configuration file, with two differences: it will not affect directories,

   and it can be changed for any subdirectory.

4.4.3. The mimeconf file

   mimeconf specifies how the different mime types are handled for indexing,

   and for display.

   Changing the indexing parameters is probably not a good idea except if you

   are a Recoll developper.

   You may want to adjust the external viewers defined in (ie: html is either

   previewed internally or displayed using firefox, but you may prefer

   mozilla, your openoffice.org program might be named oofice instead of

   openoffice ...). Look for the [view] section.

   You can also 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).

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