Installing over an older version and other notes

Note
 Ubuntu commands installed as snap packages can’t create arbitrary files under /tmp. If some of the external commands used for indexing are snaps, for best results, set TMPDIR to a location which belongs to you (e.g. inside your home, with something like export TMPDIR=~/tmp in your shell startup script). Recoll could conceivably work around the problem all by itself, but I find it in bad taste to create temporary files in an arbitrary location inside your home.

1.20 to 1.43 indexes are fully backward compatible. No need to reindex when upgrading.

Always reset the index if you do not know by which version it was created (e.g.: you’re not sure it’s at least 1.18). The best method is to quit all Recoll programs and delete the index directory (rm -rf ~/.recoll/xapiandb), then start recoll or recollindex.

recollindex -z will do the same in most, but not all, cases. It’s better to use the rm method, which will also ensure that no debris from older releases remain (e.g.: old stemming files which are not used any more).

On Windows, the index is located by default in C:/Users/[yourlogin]/AppData/Local/Recoll/xapiandb

Case/diacritics sensitivity is off by default. It can be turned on only by editing recoll.conf ( see the manual). If you do so, you must then reset the index.

Changes in Recoll 1.43.0

  • Allow suspending the real time indexer when the system is running on battery power. This is controlled by the suspendonbattery configuration parameter.

  • Use maxmemberkbs to limit the size of documents returned by exec handlers (it was already used for execm).

  • Use textfilemaxmbs to limit the size of an email body text (for avoiding issues with pathological email archives).

  • Added two safeguard parameters for the max sizes of stored text and metadata: maxdbdatarecordkbs and maxdbstoredtextmbs.

  • Add option to produce num-dash spans like 123-456-789.

  • GUI: clean up qss and css style processing. Now always base + optional dark + optional user.

  • Allow escaping wildcard characters in some cases.

  • MacOS webarchive format support.

  • Fix result table csv export: it exported too few documents.

  • Fix backslashasletter.

Minor releases at a glance

  • 1.43.7

    • GUI: updated SingleApplication to 3.5.4 for license change necessitated for Debian inclusion.

    • GUI: menu entry "query→ext dialog" was showing the wrong tab.

    • GUI: preview: work around webengine setHtml() 2Mb limit.

    • openxml indexing: properly process whitespace in Word docs with revisions/tracks.

  • 1.43.6

    • Improve the code using xslt to process xml-based formats to process multiple body or meta members: allows processing pptx, vsdx and accessing numbers in multiple xlsx sheets.

    • recollindex --stop and --help options.

    • Fix crash caused by write beyond buffer when listing extended attributes on xxBSD

    • GUI: view actions editor: memorize the window and column sizes.

    • KDE krunner: remove spurious stderr messages.

  • 1.43.5

    • GUI: Improve speed of building directory side filter contents.

    • Use locked global libmagic instance. Better performance and fixes crash on Mac OS ARM.

    • New configuration variable to add timestamps to log lines

    • GUI preview: use the common highlight color.

    • GUI webengine: improve blocking of chromium engine possible external requests.

  • 1.43.4

    • GUI: HTML preview in dark mode: do not use a dark background by default, there is no way that this can work with many documents CSS, and often results in dark text on dark background. Add option to restore the previous behaviour.

    • MS-Word handler: when antiword fails on a small .doc, fall back to soffice, then only to wvWare, which is obsolete. Very few files trigger this anyway. Another possibility would have been to use abiword itself, which might be faster.

    • Added code to process Mac OS webarchive format on other platforms.hanks to Mansour Alghamdi. Needs the plistlib and bs4 Python3 packages.

    • Add .jp2 to the image formats considered for OCR (when enabled).

    • Fixed/improved the computation of the directory side filter entries.

    • PDF: added option to force OCR on files which are not pure images.

    • Handle unencoded utf8 email headers.

  • 1.43.3

    • GUI: viewer execution: add %S to substitute with phrase if the query was a simple single phrase. Else substitutes as %s

    • GUI: preferences fix duplication of language list in interface language choice.

    • GUI: add alt+S shortcut to open the advanced search dialog (use ^W to close)

    • GUI: change the "Open parent" operation to desktop default instead of Dolphin. Using Dolphin when available allows highlighting the doc entry, but it was of course an issue on non KDE desktops.

    • Zip handler: detect encoding of metadata element when possible. Uses chardet.

    • GUI: result table save to CSV: improve performance for very big lists.

    • Repurpose the currently unused rclimg.py to perform OCR on image files. If rclimg.py is specified for image files in mimeconf (instead of the Perl+exiftool default rclimg), and if the imgocr recoll.conf parameter is true for the current location, OCR will be performed and the output used as document main text.

  • 1.43.2

    • Fix static initialisation order bug causing an immediate crash with some gcc 15 builds.

  • 1.43.1

    • Change PDF attachment indexing to using pdfdetach from poppler-utils. No more need for the java-based pdftk. PDF attachment indexing is now enabled by default.

    • Windows: automatically install VC_redist if needed.

    • Apple pages handler: tweak options to allow running headless.

    • Fix broken "remember sort state" feature.

    • Add default configuration for processing LISP files (as text).

    • Fix preview text mode bad formatting after the first chunk.