A Recoll index is defined by its configuration directory. A configuration directory contains several files which describe what should be indexed and how.
When recoll or recollindex is first executed, it
creates a default configuration directory, located in $HOME/.recoll/
on Unix-like systems and MacOS systems and %LOCALAPPDATA%/Recoll on Windows (typically
C:/Users/[me]/Appdata/Local/Recoll).
All configuration parameters have defaults, defined in system-wide files. Without further customisation, the default configuration will process your complete home directory, with a reasonable set of defaults. It can be adjusted to process different areas of the file storage, select files in different ways, and many other things.
The index configuration can be edited either by using the recoll GUI Preferences->Index configuration dialog, or by directly editing the configuration files.
A single index can process data from any subset of the computer accessible storage, as
defined by the configuration variables. The most important one is topdirs
(Start directories in the GUI), which defines the directories to be
recursively indexed. Its default value is ~, which translates to your
home directory.
In some cases, it may be useful to create additional configuration directories, for example, to separate personal and shared indexes, or to take advantage of the organization of your data to improve search precision. See the section about configuring multiple indexes for more detail.
