Full-text search for your desktop.
Recoll finds documents based on their contents as well as their file names.
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Versions are available for Linux, MS Windows and MacOS.
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It can search most document formats. You may need external applications for text extraction.
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It can reach any storage place: files, archive members, email attachments, transparently handling decompression.
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One click will open the document inside a native editor or display an even quicker text preview.
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A WEB front-end with preview and download features can replace or supplement the GUI for remote use.
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The software is free on Linux, open source, and licensed under the GPL.
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Detailed features and application requirements for supported document types.
The current Recoll version is 1.41.0 (Release history, Release notes).
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
- 2024-11-28
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There is now an Android application and its companion server for using Recoll from a mobile device.
- 2024-11-22
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Recoll (1.41) now correctly processes Tibetan, using n-grams. There are a few notes about font issues. Medium version bump because of slight changes to the text splitter.
- 2024-11-21
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Someone (NN708, not me) made a flatpak for recoll. It is now available on flathub. More details on the downloads page.
- 2024-11-15
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recoll 1.40.4. Small fixes. See the release notes. The appimage file was updated to this version.
- 2024-11-09
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I’ve set up a Recoll WEBUI instance to search the documentation on this site. Please give it a try and maybe tell me if this looks useful (jf@dockes.org).
- 2024-08-04
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recoll 1.39.4. Small fixes. See the release notes.
- 2024-07-18
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If you wondered how big a Recoll index could be: the answer is: very big (According to this reddit post).
- 2024-05-30
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Recoll 1.39.0: allow configuring non-alphanumeric characters (e.g., ,%$€) to be indexed as separate words. Allows searching for things which would previously have been indiscriminately mixed up.
- 2024-03-28
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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.
- 2024-03-08
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The Recoll WEB pages have been moved to their own host: https://www.recoll.org, for clarification and security.
- 2024-02-02
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release 1.37.4: indexer for Joplin notes. Misc bug fixes. See the release notes.
- 2022-12-07
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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
- 2021-03-09
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A contributed script for indexing Anki flashcards, and another for a Newsboat RSS reader.
- 2021-02-03
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There is now a new way to install Recoll on macOS.
- 2020-11-21
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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
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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
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A new article by a kind Recoll user about using Linux cgroups to limit indexing CPU usage.
- 2020-04-03
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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
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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
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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
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Version 1.26.5. Vastly improved OCR support, with caching. See the release notes and the manual.
- 2019
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Recoll now has a Gnome Shell Search Provider. See the downloads page.
- 2019-10-07
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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
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Version 1.25.4. Full switch to Python3, new completer tool. See the release notes.
- 2019-01-31
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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
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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
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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
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Finalizing the move to the new site, I am closing the old BitBucket project. The existing BitBucket issues have been archived.
- 2014-02-27
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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
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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
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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.