Recoll
Recoll is a full-text search tool for personal use on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. It provides efficient indexing and searching of various document formats, email archives, and file systems.
Functionality
Recoll indexes the content of files based on their text, metadata, and file structure. It supports a wide range of file formats, including:
- Plain text files (.txt)
- HTML files (.html, .htm)
- PDF documents (.pdf)
- Office documents (e.g., Microsoft Word .doc, .docx; OpenOffice/LibreOffice .odt, .ods, .odp)
- Email formats (e.g., .mbox, Maildir)
Recoll's indexing process is incremental, meaning it only re-indexes files that have been modified since the last indexing run. This helps to minimize resource usage and keeps the index up-to-date.
Search Capabilities
Recoll offers a powerful search interface with features such as:
- Keyword search: Searches for documents containing specific words or phrases.
- Boolean operators: Supports the use of AND, OR, NOT operators to refine search queries.
- Proximity search: Allows searching for words that are located within a certain distance of each other.
- Fielded search: Enables searching within specific document fields, such as the title, author, or file type.
- Stemming and lemmatization: Reduces words to their root form for more comprehensive search results.
- Ranking: Presents search results based on relevance, taking into account factors such as keyword frequency and proximity.
User Interface
Recoll provides a graphical user interface (GUI) for interacting with the search engine. The GUI allows users to:
- Configure indexing options.
- Initiate indexing runs.
- Enter search queries.
- View search results.
- Preview documents.
Architecture
Recoll is built using the Xapian search engine library. Xapian provides the underlying indexing and search capabilities, while Recoll provides the user interface and document parsing logic.
Benefits
- Efficient full-text search of local documents.
- Support for a wide range of file formats.
- Incremental indexing for minimized resource usage.
- Powerful search capabilities with boolean operators and proximity search.
- Graphical user interface for ease of use.