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 by using the dialogs in the recoll GUI.
The first time you start recoll, you
will be asked whether or not you would like it to build the
index. If you want to adjust the configuration before
indexing, just click Cancel at this
point, which will get you into the configuration interface. If
you exit at this point, recoll will have
created a ~/.recoll directory containing
empty configuration files, which you can edit by hand.
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.
As of Recoll 1.18 there are two incompatible types of Recoll indexes, depending on the treatment of character case and diacritics. The next section describes the two types in more detail.
