A more complete version of this document can be found at http://www.recoll.org * Home * Screenshots * Credits * Downloads * Installation * User manual [IMG] Recoll Recoll is a personal full text search package for Linux, FreeBSD and other Unix systems. Recoll is based on a very strong backend (Xapian), for which it provides an easy to use, feature-rich, easy administration interface. Recoll is free and copyrighted under the GPL license, see COPYING inside the distribution. A lot of the code is imported from other packages, see the Credits. Features: * QT-based GUI. * Supports the following document types: * text. * html. * OpenOffice files. * maildir and mailbox mail folders (Mozilla and Thunderbird mail ok). * pdf (with pdftotext). * postscript (with ghostscript's pstotext). * msword (with antiword). * rtf text (with unrtf). * gaim log files. along with their compressed versions. * Powerful query facilities, with boolean searches, phrases, filter on file types and directory tree. * Support for multiple charsets. Internal processing and storage uses Unicode UTF-8. * Stemming performed at query time (can switch stemming language after indexing) * Easy installation. No database daemon, web server or exotic language necessary. * An indexer which runs either as a thread inside the GUI or as an external, cron'able program. Recoll has been compiled and tested on FreeBSD, Linux, Darwin and Solaris (versions FreeBSD 5.3, Redhat 7.3, Solaris 8, but other not too distant releases should be ok too). You can download the source code here. Future evolutions Things hopefully coming in the not too far future (especially with some help): * Support for the more advanced Xapian concepts like relevance feedback. * An interactive configuration tool. * Rpms or other kinds of packages. * A more polished user interface with online help and better documentation. * More translations for the user interface. * A few more filters for less common file types. * Integration with the KDE desktop. I very much welcome suggestions or (gasp) code. In hope that this can be useful to somebody, it already is for me. * Home * Screenshots * Credits * Downloads * Installation * User manual Credits Recoll borrows (steals?) heavily from the following projects. I tried to include the relevant copyright attributions with the code. Any omission is unintentional and will be fixed as soon as notified. * Xapian: The database module (core) is used unmodified, and quite a lot of code has been borrowed from Omega, the web-based search application (ie: the html parser, plus miscellaneous bits and ideas). * Estraier: Miscellaneous pieces of code and ideas, especially for charset handling, and code from external filters. * Unac: for accent removal. This is a relatively small package, not that easy to find, it has been integrated almost unmodified in the Recoll package. * Iconv, for character set conversion. * Binc IMAP for MIME parsing code. * I fear that bugs found elsewhere are mostly mine: jean-francois.dockes@wanadoo.fr * Home * Screenshots * Credits * Downloads * Installation * User manual Introduction: full text search. A full text search program will let you search for data by specifying the terms that you think appear in the content you are looking for. 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 addition, the tool will automatically expand your search to terms related to the ones you specified. Ie: a search for floor will also look for floors, flooring etc. With Recoll you can disable this expansion when entering the query. Recoll, like most such search tools, works by remembering where terms appear in your document files. The acquisition process is called indexation. The resulting database can be big (roughly the size of the original documents in practise). This used to be a big issue, but it is probably not any more, now that text documents are tiny blots among the sea of multimedia data, especially for a personal system. Recoll is not a document archive. It can only display data from files that still exist where they lived when they were indexed. Using Recoll Indexation By default, Recoll will index your home directory. If you want to change this, you need to edit the configuration file ($HOME/.recoll/recoll.conf). Follow the comments in the file to adjust the parameters. Indexation is performed either by starting the recollindex program, or the indexing thread inside the recoll program (use the File menu). It is best to avoid interrupting the indexation process, as this can leave the database in a bad state. This is not a serious problem, as you then just need to clear everything and restart the indexation. The database files are stored in the $RECOLL_CONFDIR/xapiandb directory, which you can just delete when needed. Simple search Start the recoll program, then enter search term(s) in the text field at the top left of the window. Clicking the Search button or hitting the Enter key will start a search. By default, this will look for documents with any of the terms (the ones with more terms will get better scores). Use the Advanced search dialog for other kinds of searches A list of results will be displayed in the main list window. Clicking on an entry will open an internal preview window for the document. Double-clicking will attempt to start an external viewer (have a look at the ~/.recoll/mimeconf file to see how these are configured). 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. Search tips, shortcuts Entering a capitalized word in any search field will prevent stem expansion (example: Recoll will not look for gardening if you enter Garden instead of garden). This is the only case where character case will make a difference for a Recoll search. 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. Entering ^Q almost anywhere will close the application. Entering ^W in a preview tab will close it (and, for the last tab, close the preview window). Complex/advanced search The advanced search dialog has fields that will allow a more refined search, looking for documents with all given words, a given exact phrase, or none of the given words (all fields may be combined by an implicit AND clause). It will let you search for documents of specific mime types (ie: only text/plain, or text/html or application/pdf etc...) It will let you restrict the search results to a subtree of the indexed area. In other respects, it works like the simple search.