Recoll – desktop full-text search tool

Recoll is a personal full text search tool. It is a full text search application. Full text search applications let you find your data by content rather than by external attributes (like a file name).

Recoll is based on Xapian, a mature open source search engine library that supports advanced features such as phrase and proximity search, relevance feedback, document categorization, boolean queries, and wildcard search. Recoll provides the interface to get data into (indexing) and out (searching) of the system.

Recoll stores all internal data in Unicode UTF-8 format, and it can index files with different character sets, encodings, and languages into the same index. It has input filters for many document types.

The application has many parameters which define exactly what to index, and how to classify and decode the source documents.

Features include:

• Supports most common document types including plain text, HTML, OpenOffice.org documents, Mozilla Thunderbird and Evolution email messages, and Lyx and Scribus files.
• With external helpers: pdf (pdftotext), postscript (ghostscript), msword (antiword), excel, ppt (catdoc), rtf (unrtf).
• Powerful query facilities, with boolean searches, phrases, proximity, wildcards, filter on file types and directory tree.
• Term Explorer tool.
• Multi-language and multi-character set with Unicode based internals.
• Stemming is performed at query time and the stemming language can be switched after indexing.
• An indexer which runs either as a thread inside the GUI or as an external, cron’able program.
• Easy installation with minimal requirements – no database daemon, web server, desktop environment or exotic language needed.

Website: www.recoll.org
Support: User Manual
Developer: Miroslav Rajcic
License: BSD License

Recoll is written in C++ and Python. Learn C++ with our recommended free books and free tutorials. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

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