Recoll

Full-text search for your desktop.

Recoll moved ! The old https://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/ is now https://www.recoll.org.

Recoll finds documents based on their contents as well as their file names.

Versions are available for Linux, MS Windows and Mac OS X.
It can search most document formats. You may need external applications for text extraction.
It can reach any storage place: files, archive members, email attachments, transparently handling decompression.
One click will open the document inside a native editor or display an even quicker text preview.
A WEB front-end with preview and download features can replace or supplement the GUI for remote use.
The software is free on Linux, open source, and licensed under the GPL.
Detailed features and application requirements for supported document types.

Recoll will index an MS-Word document stored as an attachment to an e-mail message inside a Thunderbird folder archived in a Zip file (and more…). It will also help you search for it with a friendly and powerful interface, and let you open a copy of a PDF at the right page with two clicks. There is little that will remain hidden on your disk.

The current Recoll version is 1.37.5 (Release notes, Release history).

Recoll is based on the very capable Xapian search engine library, for which it provides a powerful text extraction layer and a complete, yet easy to use, Qt graphical interface.

Recoll has extensive documentation. If you run into a problem, or want to propose improvements, you are welcome to use the mailing list or problem tracker. Even if you are already using Recoll, maybe there are still a few useful search tricks that you don’t know about. A quick look at the search tips might prove useful ! Also the Faqs and Howtos section, and some contributed result list formats.

Recoll could not exist without a rich free software environment. See the credits. Thanks !

News

2024-04-16: Recoll 1.38.0 is out. Turbo-charged indexing in some situations, and a new build method which replaces the GNU autotools with a modern approach based on meson/ninja. See the release notes.
2024-03-28: Recoll gets an AppImage. This will index and search many document formats (not all) on most Linux distributions from around 2019 (the image is built on Debian Buster) and newer.
2024-03-24: Recoll 1.37.5 fixes a weird issue where the GUI refuses to exit. Only happens when the GUI is built with Qt5 (not with Qt6), and only with certain desktops and session types.
2024-03-08: The Recoll WEB pages have been moved to their own host: https://www.recoll.org, for clarification and security.
2024-02-02: release 1.37.4: indexer for Joplin notes. Misc bug fixes. See the release notes.
2023-11-22: release 1.36.2: fixes around font size inconsistencies and glitches. See the release notes.
2023-11-03: release 1.36.1: support for foreign indexers, with a sample for Joplin notes. Other small fixes and improvements. See the release notes.
2023-06-28: release 1.35.0: multiple small fixes and improvements. Change the installed librecoll location to improve sharing. See the release notes.
2023-05-12: release 1.34.7 fixes a bug which would prevent the handler memory size limitation from working, which could be an issue with, e.g., runaway ppt handlers.
2023-03-08: whisper speech to text translation is broken in 1.34.4 and 1.34.5. If you want to use it before the next release you need to download rclaudio.py from the git repository and replace it in /usr/share/recoll/filters
2023-02-15: 1.34.3 : miscellaneous improvements and fixes. See the release notes.
2022-12-26: 1.34.0 : expanding queries for likely mispellings, miscellaneous improvements. See the release notes.
2022-12-07: Debian repositories on this site: the repository key has expired on the 6th of December. It has been extended and the repositories re-signed, but you will need to download and install the key again
2022-12-02: 1.33.4 : new KDE krunner plugin. Small fixes.
2022-09-26: 1.33.1 is a small update but has a couple of changes which are not purely bug fixes, hence the middle number increment..
2022-08-20: Reverted the Debian packages from this site and the Ubuntu ones from the recoll PPA to using Qt Webkit, because Qt Webengine has worse problems than those it solves.
2022-08-07: 1.32.7 fixes the KIO for recent KF5 versions (e.g. arch linux, fedora 35 with kf5 5.96).
2022-07-08 1.32.5 Debian Bullseye display bug: The result list icons are broken on Debian Bullseye, and I have no workaround at the moment. An issue have been opened on the bug tracker
1.32.4 packages have been uploaded to an alternate directory. To use it you will need to remove recoll (sudo apt remove recollcmd), then download the recoll, recollcmd, and recollgui deb files and install them manually with dpkg (dpkg -i xxx.deb)
2022-07-05: Version 1.32.5: bug fixes for 1.32.
2022-06-29: Version 1.32.4: bug fixes for 1.32.
2022-06-21: Version 1.32.3: bug fixes for 1.32.
2021-12-20: Version 1.31.6: fixes temporary files cleanup when using tesseract OCR on PDF files.
2021-11-25: Version 1.31.4: fixes a nasty bug causing possible crashes or index corruption when indexing was interrupted.
2021-04-12: Version 1.30.1: misc improvements.
2021-03-13: Version 1.29.2: shortcuts editor.
2021-03-09: A contributed script for indexing Anki flashcards, and another for a Newsboat RSS reader.
2021-02-04: 1.28.6: fixes forgotten orgmode handler in 1.28.5.
2021-02-03: There is now a new way to install Recoll on macOS.
2021-01-15: Version 1.28.5. Improved GUI configurability. Small 1.28.3 fixes.
2020-11-21: New version 1.1.0 for the Recoll Gnome Shell Search Provider (recoll GSSP). Version 1.0.0 had stopped working with newer Gnome versions.
2020-11-18: Version 1.27.12. Improved Korean indexing, docx endnotes and footnotes support, easy switch to dark mode and misc. bug fixes, see the release notes.
2020-11-02: A new article by a kind Recoll user about using Linux cgroups to limit indexing CPU usage.
2020-04-03: Version 1.26.7. Fix the GUI settings issue described above for 1.26.6, for those who have not run 1.26.6 yet.
2020-03-26 1.26.6 update, loss of GUI preferences: Version 1.26.6. Small fixes. See the release notes
A change in 1.26.6, which was supposedly intended for Windows, has unfortunately resulted in a change of name for the GUI preferences file under Linux. This was previously named ~/.config/Recoll.org/recoll.conf, and it is is now ~/.config/Recoll.org/recoll.ini. Changing back would risk causing even more trouble for the people who have began using the new file, and besides, the new name avoids confusion with the indexing configuration file ~/.recoll/recoll.conf. In order to recover your preferences, please exit recoll, then rename ~/.config/Recoll.org/recoll.conf to ~/.config/Recoll.org/recoll.ini.
2020-03-08: The Recoll source repository and issues tracker moves to framagit. It was nice to find the opensourceprojects.eu haven when leaving Github, but there are now better alternatives. Framagit runs on the Gitlab software.
2020-02-28: Version 1.26.5. Vastly improved OCR support, with caching. See the release notes and the manual.
2019: Recoll now has a Gnome Shell Search Provider. See the downloads page.
2019-10-07: Version 1.25.23. Fixes a nasty bug in the mbox parser. Needed if you want to index gmail exports. Other small fixes. See the release notes.
2019-02-19: Version 1.25.4. Full switch to Python3, new completer tool. See the release notes.
2019-01-31: Version 1.24.5. Fixes an ennoying bug with recollindex -z resetting the index format to the one compatible with Xapian 1.2 and problematic with Xapian 1.4.
2017-12-08: Version 1.23.6 is released to provide a workaround to the Xapian 1.4 snippets generation issue. It will create indexes with the previous 'Chert' index format by default. If your index is in 'Glass' format and you are experiencing the UI freezes, you will need to delete it, by actually running rm -rf on the directory, (typically rm -rf ~/.recoll/xapiandb) before restarting the indexing.
2017-11-24: Release 1.23.5 has a few changes and fixes and supports the (still experimental) new version of the Web browser extension. Also, I split the Debian/Ubuntu packages into command-line/GUI parts (recollcmd/recollgui), with a top recoll packages which depends on both, and this causes conflicts during the upgrade. For upgrading, either first delete the recoll package, then upgrade and reinstall recoll, or fix the issues with apt -f upgrade
2017-07-31: Finalizing the move to the new site, I am closing the old BitBucket project. The existing BitBucket issues have been archived.
2014-02-27: While working on a Recoll-Mutt interface I discovered incidentally that the Recoll Webui Web interface works quite well with the links web browser inside a terminal window. This appears to be an interesting solution for people looking for a search interface usable in a non-GUI environment.
2013-04-30: Thanks to some of its users, Recoll now has filters to index and retrieve Lotus Notes messages (some implementation notes from an early user), and there is also now a Web browser interface for querying your Recoll indexes.
2012-09-11: A new user-contributed script for those who use real-time indexing on laptops: stop or start indexing according to AC power status. See the details on the Wiki.