Many aspects of the Recoll GUI can be customised from dialogs reached through the → menu choice.
Not all choices from the different panels will be described below. Many are self-evident or have sufficient tooltip text to provide explanations.
Choose editor application: this opens the dialog which allows you to select the application to be used to open each MIME type, which was described in detail in the previous section.
Single application: when checked, starting the Recoll GUI will activate an existing instance instead of creating a new one.
Start with simple search mode: this lets you choose the value of the simple search type on program startup. Either a fixed value (e.g.
Query Language
), or the value in use when the program last exited.Maximum size of search history: limit how many searches are stored in the history. Set to -1 for no limit. The history can be cleared in the File menu.
Start with advanced search dialog open : If you use this dialog frequently, checking the entries will get it to open when the GUI starts.
Remember sort activation state if set, the GUI will remember the sort tool state between invocations. It normally starts with sorting disabled.
Depth of side filter directory tree: decide how many levels should be shown in the directory filter panel.
Side filter dates format: allows changing how dates are displayed in the side filter. See the tooltip for details.
Document filter choice style: this will let you choose if the document categories are displayed as a list or a set of buttons, or a menu.
Disable Qt autocompletion in search entry: this will disable the completion popup. Il will only appear, and display the full history, either if you enter only white space in the search area, or if you click the clock button on the right of the area.
Highlight CSS style for query terms: Terms from the user query are highlighted in the result list and the preview window. The highligthing style can be chosen here, for example
color: blue
orcolor: red;background: yellow
. Mostly any CSS style should work.Display scale: This actually adjust the font sizes everywhere inside the GUI and can be used on High resolution displays if the default characters are too small.
Style sheet: The name of a Qt style sheet text file which is applied to the whole GUI on startup. The default value is empty, but there is a skeleton style sheet (
recoll.qss
) inside the/usr/share/recoll/examples
directory. Using a style sheet, you can change most recoll graphical parameters: colors, fonts, etc. See the sample file for a few simple examples.You should be aware that parameters (e.g.: the background color) set inside the Recoll GUI style sheet will override global system preferences, with possible strange side effects: for example if you set the foreground to a light color and the background to a dark one in the desktop preferences, but only the background is set inside the Recoll style sheet, and it is light too, then text will appear light-on-light inside the Recoll GUI.
Result list font: There is quite a lot of information shown in the result list, and you may want to customise the font and/or font size. The rest of the fonts used by Recoll are determined by your generic Qt configuration (try the qtconfig command).
Edit result list paragraph format string: allows you to change the presentation of each result list entry. See the result list customisation section.
Edit result page HTML header insert: allows you to define text inserted at the end of the result page HTML header. More detail in the result list customisation section.
Date format: allows specifying the format used for displaying dates inside the result list. This should be specified as an strftime() string (man strftime).
Abstract snippet separator: for synthetic abstracts built from index data, which are usually made of several snippets from different parts of the document, this defines the snippet separator, an ellipsis by default.
Maximum text size highlighted for preview: Disable search term highlighting for texts bigger than the given size to speed up loading. Creating highlights on search terms involves quite a lot of processing, and can be slow.
Prefer HTML to plain text for preview: if set, Recoll will display HTML as such inside the preview window. If this causes display problems, you can uncheck it to display the plain text version instead. A common issue is insufficient contrast on a dark mode display, caused by the document style sheet.
Activate links in preview: if set, Recoll will turn HTTP links found inside plain text into proper HTML anchors, and clicking a link inside a preview window will start the default browser on the link target.
Fields display: max field length before using summary: this is used to limit the size of metadata text displayed on the fields view (reached through the right-click popup). Fields over this size will be truncated, with a clickable option to expand.
Plain text to HTML line style: when displaying plain text inside the preview window, Recoll tries to preserve some of the original text line breaks and indentation. It can either use PRE HTML tags, which will well preserve the indentation but will force horizontal scrolling for long lines, or use BR tags to break at the original line breaks, which will let the editor introduce other line breaks according to the window width, but will lose some of the original indentation. The third option is the default and probably the best one in most cases: use PRE tags with line wrapping.
Search term line offset: how many lines to display over a search hit. Allows having some context for the found search term.
Hide duplicate results: decides if result list entries are shown for identical documents found in different places.
Stemming language: stemming obviously depends on the document's language. This listbox will let you chose among the stemming databases which were built during indexing (this is set in the main configuration file), or later added with recollindex -s (See the recollindex manual). Stemming languages which are dynamically added will be deleted at the next indexing pass unless they are also added in the configuration file.
Automatically add phrase to simple searches: a phrase will be automatically built and added to simple searches when looking for
Any terms
. This will give a relevance boost to the results where the search terms appear as a phrase (consecutive and in order).Autophrase term frequency threshold percentage: very frequent terms should not be included in automatic phrase searches for performance reasons. The parameter defines the cutoff percentage (percentage of the documents where the term appears).
Replace abstracts from documents: this decides if we should synthesize and display an abstract in place of an explicit abstract found within the document itself.
Dynamically build abstracts: this decides if Recoll tries to build document abstracts (lists of snippets) when displaying the result list. Abstracts are constructed by taking context from the document information, around the search terms.
Synthetic abstract size: adjust to taste.
Synthetic abstract context words: how many words should be displayed around each term occurrence.
Query language magic file name suffixes: a list of words which automatically get turned into
ext:xxx
file name suffix clauses when starting a query language query (e.g.:doc xls xlsx...
). This will save some typing for people who use file types a lot when querying.
This panel will let you browse for additional indexes that you may want to
search. External indexes are designated by their database directory (e.g.:
/home/someothergui/.recoll/xapiandb
,
/usr/local/recollglobal/xapiandb
).
Once entered, the indexes will appear in the External indexes list, and you can chose which ones you want to use at any moment by checking or unchecking their entries.
Your main database (the one the current configuration indexes to), is always implicitly active. If this is not desirable, you can set up your configuration so that it indexes, for example, an empty directory. An alternative indexer may also need to implement a way of purging the index from stale data.