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) has multiple entry fields, which you may use to build a logical condition, with additional filtering on file type, location in the file system, modification date, and size.
In most cases, you can enter the terms as you think them, even if they contain embedded punctuation or other non-textual characters. For example, Recoll can handle things like email 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).
Some searches can be quite complex, and you may want to re-use them later, perhaps with some tweaking. Recoll versions 1.21 and later can save and restore searches, using XML files. See Saving and restoring queries.
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 Query language. Without special directives, this will look for documents containing all of the search terms (the ones with more terms will get better scores), just like the All terms mode which will ignore such directives. Any term will search for documents where at least one of the terms appear.
The Query Language features are described in a separate 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.
File name will specifically look for file names. The point of having a separate file name search is that wild card expansion can be performed more efficiently on a small subset of the index (allowing wild cards on the left of terms without excessive penality). Things to know:
White space in the entry should match white space in the file name, and is not treated specially.
The search is insensitive to character case and accents, independantly of the type of index.
An entry without any wild card
character and not capitalized will be prepended and appended
with '*' (ie: etc
->
*etc*
, but
Etc
->
etc
).
If you have a big index (many files), excessively generic fragments may result in inefficient searches.
You can search for exact phrases (adjacent words in a
given order) by enclosing the input inside double quotes. Ex:
"virtual reality"
.
When using a stripped index, 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. Stemming can also be disabled globally in the
preferences. When using a raw index, the rules are a bit more
complicated.
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.
You can cut and paste any text into an All
terms or Any term search field,
punctuation, newlines and all - except for wildcard characters
(single ?
characters are ok). 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.
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 sort the result by ascending or descending date by using the vertical arrows in the toolbar.
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 Open
link will
start an external viewer for the document. By default, Recoll lets
the desktop choose the appropriate application for most document
types (there is a short list of exceptions, see further). If you
prefer to completely customize the choice of applications, you can
uncheck the Use desktop preferences option in
the GUI preferences dialog, and click the Choose editor
applications button to adjust the predefined Recoll
choices. The tool accepts multiple selections of MIME types (e.g. to
set up the editor for the dozens of office file types).
Even when Use desktop preferences is checked, there is a small list of exceptions, for MIME types where the Recoll choice should override the desktop one. These are applications which are well integrated with Recoll, especially evince for viewing PDF and Postscript files because of its support for opening the document at a specific page and passing a search string as an argument. Of course, you can edit the list (in the GUI preferences) if you would prefer to lose the functionality and use the standard desktop tool.
You may also change the choice of applications by editing the
mimeview
configuration file if you find
this more convenient.
Each result entry also has a right-click menu with an Open With entry. This lets you choose an application from the list of those which registered with the desktop for the document MIME type.
The Preview
and Open
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.
When a search yields no result, and if the aspell dictionary is configured, Recoll will try to check for misspellings among the query terms, and will propose lists of replacements. Clicking on one of the suggestions will replace the word and restart the search. You can hold any of the modifier keys (Ctrl, Shift, etc.) while clicking if you would rather stay on the suggestion screen because several terms need replacement.
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
Open
Open With
Run Script
Copy File Name
Copy Url
Save to File
Find similar
Preview Parent document
Open Parent document
Open Snippets Window
The Preview and Open entries do the same thing as the corresponding links.
Open With lets you open the document
with one of the applications claiming to be able to handle its MIME
type (the information comes from the .desktop
files in
/usr/share/applications
).
Run Script allows starting an arbitrary command on the result file. It will only appear for results which are top-level files. See further for a more detailed description.
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 Open/Preview Parent document entries allow working with the higher level document (e.g. the email message an attachment comes from). Recoll is sometimes not totally accurate as to what it can or can't do in this area. For example the Parent entry will also appear for an email which is part of an mbox folder file, but you can't actually visualize the mbox (there will be an error dialog if you try).
If the document is a top-level file, Open Parent will start the default file manager on the enclosing filesystem directory.
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. I can't remember a single instance where this function was actually useful to me...
The Open Snippets Window entry will only appear for documents which support page breaks (typically PDF, Postscript, DVI). The snippets window lists extracts from the document, taken around search terms occurrences, along with the corresponding page number, as links which can be used to start the native viewer on the appropriate page. If the viewer supports it, its search function will also be primed with one of the search terms.
In Recoll 1.15 and newer, the results can be displayed in spreadsheet-like fashion. You can switch to this presentation by clicking the table-like icon in the toolbar (this is a toggle, click again to restore the list).
Clicking on the column headers will allow sorting by the values in the column. You can click again to invert the order, and use the header right-click menu to reset sorting to the default relevance order (you can also use the sort-by-date arrows to do this).
Both the list and the table display the same underlying results. The sort order set from the table is still active if you switch back to the list mode. You can click twice on a date sort arrow to reset it from there.
The header right-click menu allows adding or deleting columns. The columns can be resized, and their order can be changed (by dragging). All the changes are recorded when you quit recoll
Hovering over a table row will update the detail area at the bottom of the window with the corresponding values. You can click the row to freeze the display. The bottom area is equivalent to a result list paragraph, with links for starting a preview or a native application, and an equivalent right-click menu. Typing Esc (the Escape key) will unfreeze the display.
Apart from the Open and Open With operations, which allow starting an application on a result document (or a temporary copy), based on its MIME type, it is also possible to run arbitrary commands on results which are top-level files, using the Run Script entry in the results pop-up menu.
The commands which will appear in the Run
Script submenu must be defined by
.desktop
files inside the
scripts
subdirectory of the current
configuration directory.
Here follows an example of a .desktop
file,
which could be named for example,
~/.recoll/scripts/myscript.desktop
(the exact
file name inside the directory is irrelevant):
[Desktop Entry] Type=Application Name=MyFirstScript Exec=/home/me/bin/tryscript %F MimeType=*/*
The Name
attribute defines the label which will
appear inside the Run Script menu. The
Exec
attribute defines the program to be run,
which does not need to actually be a script, of course. The
MimeType
attribute is not used, but needs to exist.
The commands defined this way can also be used from links inside the result paragraph.
As an example, it might make sense to write a script which would move the document to the trash and purge it from the Recoll index.
The default format for the result list entries and the detail area of the result table display an icon for each result document. The icon is either a generic one determined from the MIME type, or a thumbnail of the document appearance. Thumbnails are only displayed if found in the standard freedesktop location, where they would typically have been created by a file manager.
Recoll has no capability to create thumbnails. A relatively simple trick is to use the Open parent document/folder entry in the result list popup menu. This should open a file manager window on the containing directory, which should in turn create the thumbnails (depending on your settings). Restarting the search should then display the thumbnails.
There are also some pointers about thumbnail generation on the Recoll wiki.
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 Ctrl-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).
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. In the case of images, you can switch between three displays: the image itself, the image metadata as extracted by exiftool and the fields, which is the metadata stored in the index.
You can print the current preview window contents by typing Ctrl-P (Ctrl + P) in the window text.
The preview window has an internal search capability, mostly controlled by the panel at the bottom of the window, which works in two modes: as a classical editor incremental search, where we look for the text entered in the entry zone, or as a way to walk the matches between the document and the Recoll query that found it.
The preview tabs have an internal incremental search function. You initiate the search either by typing a / (slash) or CTL-F 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 Ctrl-Up/Ctrl-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.
If the entry area is empty when you click the Next or Previous buttons, the editor will be scrolled to show the next match to any search term (the next highlighted zone). If you select a search group from the dropdown list and click Next or Previous, the match list for this group will be walked. This is not the same as a text search, because the occurences will include non-exact matches (as caused by stemming or wildcards). The search will revert to the text mode as soon as you edit the entry area.
Selecting the
→ menu entry will open a window with radio- and check-buttons which can be used to activate query language fragments for filtering the current query. This can be useful if you have frequent reusable selectors, for example, filtering on alternate directories, or searching just one category of files, not covered by the standard category selectors.The contents of the window are entirely customizable, and
defined by the contents of the fragbuts.xml
file inside the configuration directory. The sample file
distributed with Recoll (which you should be able to find under
/usr/share/recoll/examples/fragbuts.xml
),
contains an example which filters the results from the WEB
history.
Here follows an example:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <fragbuts version="1.0"> <radiobuttons> <fragbut> <label>Include Web Results</label> <frag></frag> </fragbut> <fragbut> <label>Exclude Web Results</label> <frag>-rclbes:BGL</frag> </fragbut> <fragbut> <label>Only Web Results</label> <frag>rclbes:BGL</frag> </fragbut> </radiobuttons> <buttons> <fragbut> <label>Year 2010</label> <frag>date:2010-01-01/2010-12-31</frag> </fragbut> <fragbut> <label>My Great Directory Only</label> <frag>dir:/my/great/directory</frag> </fragbut> </buttons> </fragbuts>
Each radiobuttons
or
buttons
section defines a line of
checkbuttons or radiobuttons inside the window. Any number of
buttons can be selected, but the radiobuttons in a line are
exclusive.
Each fragbut
section defines the label
for a button, and the Query Language fragment which will be
added (as an AND filter) before performing the query if the
button is active.
This feature is new in Recoll 1.20, and will probably be refined depending on user feedback.
The advanced search dialog helps you build more complex queries without memorizing the search language constructs. It can be opened through the Tools menu or through the main toolbar.
Recoll keeps a history of searches. See Advanced search history.
The dialog has two tabs:
The first tab lets you specify terms to search for, and permits specifying multiple clauses which are combined to build the search.
The second tab lets filter the results according to file size, date of modification, MIME type, or location.
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.
This part of the dialog lets you constructc 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.
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
.
This part of the dialog has several sections which allow filtering the results of a search according to a number of criteria
The first section allows filtering by dates of last modification. You can specify both a minimum and a maximum date. The initial values are set according to the oldest and newest documents found in the index.
The next section allows filtering the results by
file size. There are two entries for minimum and maximum
size. Enter decimal numbers. You can use suffix multipliers:
k/K
, m/M
,
g/G
, t/T
for 1E3, 1E6,
1E9, 1E12 respectively.
The next section allows filtering the results by their MIME types, or MIME categories (ie: media/text/message/etc.).
You can transfer the types between two boxes, to define which will be included or excluded by the search.
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 section allows restricting the search results to a sub-tree of the indexed area. You can use the Invert checkbox to search for files not in the sub-tree instead. If you use directory filtering often and on big subsets of the file system, you may think of setting up multiple indexes instead, as the performance may be better.
You can use relative/partial paths for filtering. Ie,
entering dirA/dirB
would match either
/dir1/dirA/dirB/myfile1
or
/dir2/dirA/dirB/someother/myfile2
.
The advanced search tool memorizes the last 100 searches performed. You can walk the saved searches by using the up and down arrow keys while the keyboard focus belongs to the advanced search dialog.
The complex search history can be erased, along with the one for simple search, by selecting the
→ menu entry.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 search will only propose replacement terms with spelling variations when no matching document were found. In some cases, both proper spellings and mispellings are present in the index, and it may be interesting to look for them explicitely.
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 10000 results for
wildcards and regular expressions. It is possible to change the
limit in the configuration file.
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).
See the section describing the use of multiple indexes for generalities. Only the aspects concerning the recoll GUI are described here.
A recoll program instance is always associated with a specific index, which is the one to be updated when requested from the menu, 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. 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.
When adding a new index to the set, you can select either a Recoll configuration directory, or directly a Xapian index directory. In the first case, the Xapian index directory will be obtained from the selected configuration.
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
Another environment variable,
RECOLL_ACTIVE_EXTRA_DBS
allows adding to the active
list of indexes. This variable was suggested and implemented by a
Recoll user. It is mostly useful if you use scripts to mount
external volumes with Recoll indexes. By using
RECOLL_EXTRA_DBS
and
RECOLL_ACTIVE_EXTRA_DBS
, you can add and activate
the index for the mounted volume when starting
recoll.
RECOLL_ACTIVE_EXTRA_DBS
is available for
Recoll versions 1.17.2 and later. A change was made in the same
update so that recoll will
automatically deactivate unreachable indexes when starting
up.
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 menu.
The documents in a result list are normally sorted in order of relevance. It is possible to specify a different sort order, either by using the vertical arrows in the GUI toolbox to sort by date, or switching to the result table display and clicking on any header. The sort order chosen inside the result table remains active if you switch back to the result list, until you click one of the vertical arrows, until both are unchecked (you are back to sort by relevance).
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 GUI configuration dialog, and is off by default.
As of release 1.19, when a result document does have
undisplayed duplicates, a Dups
link will be shown with the result list entry. Clicking the
link will display the paths (URLs + ipaths) for the duplicate
entries.
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.
Automatic suffixes. Words like odt
or ods
can be automatically turned into query language
ext:xxx
clauses. This can be enabled in the
Search preferences panel in the GUI.
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.
Phrase searches can strongly slow down a query if most of the
terms in the phrase are common. This is why the
autophrase
option is off by default for Recoll
versions before 1.17. As of version 1.17,
autophrase
is on by default, but very common
terms will be removed from the constructed phrase. The removal
threshold can be adjusted from the search preferences.
Phrases and abbreviations. As of
Recoll version 1.17, dotted abbreviations like
I.B.M.
are also automatically indexed as a word
without the dots: IBM
. Searching for the word
inside a phrase (ie: "the IBM company"
) will only
match the dotted abrreviation if you increase the phrase slack (using the
advanced search panel control, or the o
query
language modifier). Literal occurences of the word will be matched
normally.
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
Ajusting the result table columns. When displaying results in table mode, you can use a right click on the table headers to activate a pop-up menu which will let you adjust what columns are displayed. You can drag the column headers to adjust their order. You can click them to sort by the field displayed in the column. You can also save the result list in CSV format.
Changing the GUI geometry. It is possible to configure the GUI in wide form factor by dragging the toolbars to one of the sides (their location is remembered between sessions), and moving the category filters to a menu (can be set in the
→ → panel).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.
Advanced search history. As of Recoll 1.18, you can display any of the last 100 complex searches performed by using the up and down arrow keys while the advanced search panel is active.
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.
Scrolling the result list from the keyboard. You can use PageUp and PageDown to scroll the result list, Shift+Home to go back to the first page. These work even while the focus is in the search entry.
Result table: moving the focus to the table. You can use Ctrl-r to move the focus from the search entry to the table, and then use the arrow keys to change the current row. Ctrl-Shift-s returns to the search.
Result table: open / preview. With the focus in the result table, you can use Ctrl-o to open the document from the current row, Ctrl-Shift-o to open the document and close recoll, Ctrl-d to preview the document.
Editing a new search while the focus is not in the search entry. You can use the Ctrl-Shift-S shortcut to return the cursor to the search entry (and select the current search text), while the focus is anywhere in the main window.
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 Ctrl-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.
Printing previews. Entering Ctrl-P in a preview window will print the currently displayed text.
Quitting. Entering Ctrl-Q almost anywhere will close the application.
Both simple and advanced query dialogs save recent history, but the amount is limited: old queries will eventually be forgotten. Also, important queries may be difficult to find among others. This is why both types of queries can also be explicitely saved to files, from the GUI menus:
→The default location for saved queries is a subdirectory of the current configuration directory, but saved queries are ordinary files and can be written or moved anywhere.
Some of the saved query parameters are part of the
preferences (e.g. autophrase
or the active
external indexes), and may differ when the query is
loaded from the time it was saved. In this case, Recoll will warn
of the differences, but will not change the user
preferences.
You can customize some aspects of the search interface by using the
entry in the menu.There are several tabs in the dialog, dealing with the interface itself, the parameters used for searching and returning results, and what indexes are searched.
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
.
Style sheet:
The name of a Qt style sheet
text file which is applied to the whole Recoll application
on startup. The default value is empty, but there is a
skeleton style sheet (recoll.qss
)
inside the /usr/share/recoll/examples
directory. Using a style sheet, you can change most
recoll graphical parameters:
colors, fonts, etc. See the sample file for a few
simple examples.
You should be aware that parameters (e.g.: the background color) set inside the Recoll GUI style sheet will override global system preferences, with possible strange side effects: for example if you set the foreground to a light color and the background to a dark one in the desktop preferences, but only the background is set inside the Recoll style sheet, and it is light too, then text will appear light-on-light inside the Recoll GUI.
Maximum text size highlighted for preview Inserting highlights on search term inside the text before inserting it in the preview window involves quite a lot of processing, and can be disabled over the given text size to speed up loading.
Prefer HTML to plain text for preview if set, Recoll will display HTML as such inside the preview window. If this causes problems with the Qt HTML display, you can uncheck it to display the plain text version instead.
Plain text to HTML line style: when displaying plain text inside the preview window, Recoll tries to preserve some of the original text line breaks and indentation. It can either use PRE HTML tags, which will well preserve the indentation but will force horizontal scrolling for long lines, or use BR tags to break at the original line breaks, which will let the editor introduce other line breaks according to the window width, but will lose some of the original indentation. The third option has been available in recent releases and is probably now the best one: use PRE tags with line wrapping.
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 Open 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.
Exceptions: when using the desktop preferences for opening documents, these are MIME types that will still be opened according to Recoll preferences. This is useful for passing parameters like page numbers or search strings to applications that support them (e.g. evince). This cannot be done with xdg-open which only supports passing one parameter.
Choose editor applications this will let you choose the command started by the Open links inside the result list, for specific document types.
Display category filter as toolbar... this will let you choose if the document categories are displayed as a list or a set of buttons.
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 : If you use this dialog frequently, checking the entries will get it to open when recoll starts.
Remember sort activation state if set, Recoll will remember the sort tool stat between invocations. It normally starts with sorting disabled.
Number of results in a result page
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).
Edit result list paragraph format string: allows you to change the presentation of each result list entry. See the result list customisation section.
Edit result page HTML header insert: allows you to define text inserted at the end of the result page HTML header. More detail in the result list customisation section.
Date format: allows specifying the format used for displaying dates inside the result list. This should be specified as an strftime() string (man strftime).
Abstract snippet separator: for synthetic abstracts built from index data, which are usually made of several snippets from different parts of the document, this defines the snippet separator, an ellipsis by default.
Hide duplicate results: decides if result list entries are shown for identical documents found in different places.
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.
Automatically add phrase to simple
searches: a phrase will be automatically built and
added to simple searches when looking for Any
terms
. This will give a relevance boost to the
results where the search terms appear as a phrase (consecutive
and in order).
Autophrase term frequency threshold percentage: very frequent terms should not be included in automatic phrase searches for performance reasons. The parameter defines the cutoff percentage (percentage of the documents where the term appears).
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.
Dynamically build abstracts: this decides if Recoll tries to build document abstracts (lists of snippets) when displaying the result list. Abstracts are constructed by taking context from the document information, around the search terms.
Synthetic abstract size: adjust to taste...
Synthetic abstract context words: how many words should be displayed around each term occurrence.
Query language magic file name
suffixes: a list of words which automatically get
turned into ext:xxx
file name suffix clauses
when starting a query language query (ie: doc xls
xlsx...
). This will save some typing for people who
use file types a lot when querying.
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,
Newer versions of Recoll (from 1.17) normally use WebKit HTML widgets for the result list and the snippets window (this may be disabled at build time). Total customisation is possible with full support for CSS and Javascript. Conversely, there are limits to what you can do with the older Qt QTextBrowser, but still, it is possible to decide what data each result will contain, and how it will be displayed.
The result list presentation can be exhaustively customized by adjusting two elements:
The paragraph format
HTML code inside the header section. For versions 1.21 and later, this is also used for the snippets window
The paragraph format and the header fragment can be edited from the Result list tab of the GUI configuration.
The header fragment is used both for the result list and
the snippets window. The snippets list is a table and has a
snippets
class attribute. Each paragraph in
the result list is a table, with class
respar
, but this can be changed by editing
the paragraph format.
There are a few examples on the page about customising the result list on the Recoll web site.
This is an arbitrary HTML string where the following printf-like
%
substitutions will be performed:
%A. Abstract
%D. Date
%I. Icon image
name. This is normally determined from the MIME type. The
associations are defined inside the
mimeconf
configuration file.
If a thumbnail for the file is found at
the standard Freedesktop location, this will be displayed
instead.
%K. Keywords (if any)
%L. Precooked Preview, Edit, and possibly Snippets links
%M. MIME type
%N. result Number inside the result page
%P. Parent folder Url. In the case of an embedded document, this is the parent folder for the top level container file.
%R. Relevance percentage
%S. Size information
%T. Title or Filename if not set.
%t. Title or Filename if not set.
%U. Url
The format of the Preview, Edit, and Snippets links is
<a href="P%N">
,
<a href="E%N">
and
<a href="A%N">
where docnum
(%N) expands to the document
number inside the result page).
A link target defined as "F%N"
will open
the document corresponding to the %P
parent
folder expansion, usually creating a file manager window on the
folder where the container file resides. E.g.:
<a href="F%N">%P</a>
A link target defined as
R%N|
will
run the corresponding script on the result file (if the document is
embedded, the script will be started on the top-level parent).
See the section about
defining scripts.scriptname
In addition to the predefined values above, all strings
like %(fieldname)
will be replaced by the
value of the field named fieldname
for this
document. Only stored fields can be accessed in this way, the
value of indexed but not stored fields is not known at this
point in the search process
(see field
configuration). There are currently very few fields
stored by default, apart from the values above
(only author
and filename
), so this feature will need
some custom local configuration to be useful. An example
candidate would be the recipient
field
which is generated by the message input handlers.
The default value for the paragraph format string is:
"<table class=\"respar\">\n" "<tr>\n" "<td><a href='%U'><img src='%I' width='64'></a></td>\n" "<td>%L <i>%S</i> <b>%T</b><br>\n" "<span style='white-space:nowrap'><i>%M</i> %D</span> <i>%U</i> %i<br>\n" "%A %K</td>\n" "</tr></table>\n"
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
Note that the P%N link in the above paragraph makes the title a preview link. 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
These samples, and some others are on the web site, with pictures to show how they look.
It is also possible to define the value of the snippet separator inside the abstract section.