If you do not like reading manuals (who does?) and would like to give Recoll a try, just perform installation and start the recoll user interface, which will index your home directory by default, allowing you to search immediately after indexing completes.
Do not do this if your home directory contains a huge number of documents and you do not want to wait or are very short on disk space. In this case, you may first want to customize the configuration to restrict the indexed area.
Also be aware that you may need to install the appropriate supporting applications for document types that need them (for example antiword for ms-word files).
Recoll is a full text search application. Full text search applications let you find your data by content rather than by external attributes (like a file name). More specifically, they will let you specify words (terms) that should or should not appear in the text you are looking for, and return a list of matching documents, ordered so that the most relevant documents will appear first.
You do not need to remember in what file or email message you stored a given piece of information. You just ask for related terms, and the tool will return a list of documents where those terms are prominent, in a similar way to Internet search engines.
Recoll tries to determine which documents are most relevant to the search terms you provide. Computer algorithms for determining relevance can be very complex, and in general are inferior to the power of the human mind to rapidly determine relevance. The quality of relevance guessing by the search tool is probably the most important element for a search application.
In many cases, you are looking for all the forms of a word, not for a specific form or spelling. These different forms may include plurals, different tenses for a verb, or terms derived from the same root or stem (example: floor, floors, floored, flooring...). Recoll will by default expand queries to all such related terms (words that reduce to the same stem). This expansion can be disabled at search time.
Stemming, by itself, does not accommodate for misspellings or phonetic searches. Recoll supports these features through a specific tool (the term explorer) which will let you explore the set of index terms along different modes.
Recoll uses the Xapian information retrieval library as its storage and retrieval engine. Xapian is a very mature package using a sophisticated probabilistic ranking model. Recoll provides the interface to get data into (indexing) and out (searching) of the system.
In practice, Xapian works by remembering where terms appear in your document files. The acquisition process is called indexing.
The resulting index can be big (roughly the size of the original document set), but it is not a document archive. Recoll can only display documents that still exist at the place from which they were indexed. (Actually, there is a way to reconstruct a document from the information in the index, but the result is not nice, as all formatting, punctuation and capitalization are lost).
Recoll stores all internal data in Unicode UTF-8 format, and it can index files with different character sets, encodings, and languages into the same index. It has input filters for many document types.
Stemming depends on the document language. Recoll stores the unstemmed versions of terms and uses auxiliary databases for term expansion. It can switch stemming languages, or add a language, without re-indexing. Storing documents in different languages in the same index is possible, and useful in practice, but does introduce possibilities of confusion. Recoll currently makes no attempt at automatic language recognition.
Recoll has many parameters which define exactly what to index, and how to classify and decode the source documents. These are kept in configuration files. A default configuration is copied into a standard location (usually something like /usr/[local/]share/recoll/examples) during installation. The default parameters from this file may be overridden by values that you set inside your personal configuration, found by default in the .recoll sub-directory of your home directory. The default configuration will index your home directory with default parameters and should be sufficient for giving Recoll a try, but you may want to adjust it later.
Indexing is started automatically the first time you execute the recoll search graphical user interface, or by executing the recollindex command.
Searches are performed inside the recoll program, which has many options to help you find what you are looking for.
Indexing is the process by which the set of documents is analyzed and the data entered into the database. Recoll indexing is normally incremental: documents will only be processed if they have been modified. On the first execution, of course, all documents will need processing. A full index build can be forced later by specifying an option to the indexing command (recollindex -z).
Recoll indexing can be performed with two different methods:
Periodic indexing: indexing takes place at discrete times, by executing the recollindex command. The typical usage is to have a nightly indexing run programmed into your cron file.
Real time indexing: indexing takes place as soon as a file is created or changed. recollindex runs as a daemon and uses a file system alteration monitor such as Fam, Gamin or inotify do detect file changes. Monitoring a big directory tree can consume significant system resources.
The choice between the two methods is mostly a matter of preference, and they can be combined by setting up multiple indexes (ie: use periodic indexing on a big documentation directory, and real time indexing on a small home directory). Monitoring a big file system tree can consume significant system resources, for dubious gains.
Recoll knows about quite a few different document types. The parameters for document types recognition and processing are set in configuration files Most file types, like HTML or word processing files, only hold one document. Some file types, like mail folder files, can hold many individually indexed documents.
Recoll indexing processes plain text, HTML, openoffice and e-mail files internally (a few more actually).
Other file types (ie: postscript, pdf, ms-word, rtf ...) need external applications for preprocessing. The list is in the installation section. After every indexing operation, Recoll updates a list of commands that would be needed for indexing existing files types. This list can be displayed from the recoll File menu. It is stored in the missing text file inside the configuration directory.
Without further configuration, Recoll will index all appropriate files from your home directory, with a reasonable set of defaults.
In some cases, it may be interesting to index different areas of the file system to separate databases. You can do this by using multiple configuration directories, each indexing a file system area to a specific database. See the section about using multiple databases for more information on multiple configurations and indexes.
In the rare case where the index becomes corrupted (which can signal itself by weird search results or crashes), the index files need to be erased before restarting a clean indexing pass. Just delete the xapiandb directory (see next section), or, alternatively, start the next recollindex with the -z option, which will reset the database before indexing.
The default location for the index data is the xapiandb subdirectory of the Recoll configuration directory, typically $HOME/.recoll/xapiandb/. This can be changed via two different methods (with different purposes):
You can specify a different configuration directory by setting the RECOLL_CONFDIR environment variable, or using the -c option to the Recoll commands. This method would typically be used to index different areas of the file system to different indexes. For example, if you were to issue the following commands:
export RECOLL_CONFDIR=~/.indexes-email
recoll
Then Recoll would use configuration files stored in ~/.indexes-email/ and, (unless specified otherwise in recoll.conf) would look for the index in ~/.indexes-email/xapiandb/. Using multiple configuration directories and configuration options allows you to tailor multiple configurations and indexes to handle whatever subset of the available data that you wish to make searchable.
You can also specify a different storage location for the index by setting the dbdir parameter in the configuration file (see the configuration section). This method would mainly be of use if you wanted to keep the configuration directory in its default location, but desired another location for the index, typically out of disk occupation concerns.
The size of the index is determined by the document set size, but the ratio can vary a lot. For a typical mixed set of documents, the index size will often be close to the data set size. In specific cases (a set of compressed mbox files for example), the index can become much bigger than the documents. It may also be much smaller if the documents contain a lot of images or other non-indexed data (an extreme example being a set of mp3 files where only the tags would be indexed).
Of course, images, sound and video do not increase the index size, which means that it will be quite typical nowadays (2006), that even a big index will be negligible against the total amount of data on the computer.
The index data directory (xapiandb) only contains data that can be completely rebuilt by an index run, and it can always be destroyed safely.
If your first installation of Recoll was 1.9.0 or more recent, you can skip this section.
Xapian has had two possible index formats for quite some time. The "old" one named Quartz, and the new one named Flint. Xapian 0.9 used Quartz by default, but could use Flint if a specific environment variable (XAPIAN_PREFER_FLINT) was set. Xapian 1.0 still supports Quartz but will use Flint by default for new index creations.
The number of disk accesses performed during indexing has been much optimized in the new Flint engine and you may see indexing times improved by 50% in some cases (compared to Quartz), typically for big indexes where disk accesses dominate the indexing time. There is also a more modest improvement of index size.
Xapian will not convert automatically an existing index from the Quartz to the Flint format. If you have an older index and want to take advantage of the new format (which can be done without setting the environment variable as of Recoll 1.8.2 and Xapian 1.0.0), you will have to explicitly delete the old index, then run a normal indexing process.
Unfortunately, using the -z option to recollindex is not sufficient to change the format, you have to delete all files inside the index directory (typically ~/.recoll/xapiandb) before starting indexing.
The Recoll index does not hold copies of the indexed documents. But it does hold enough data to allow for an almost complete reconstruction. If confidential data is indexed, access to the database directory should be restricted.
As of version 1.4, Recoll will create the configuration directory with a mode of 0700 (access by owner only). As the index data directory is by default a sub-directory of the configuration directory, this should result in appropriate protection.
If you use another setup, you should think of the kind of protection you need for your index, set the directory and files access modes appropriately, and also maybe adjust the umask used during index updates.
Variables set inside the Recoll configuration files control which areas of the file system are indexed, and how files are processed. These variables can be set either by editing the text files or using the dialogs in the recoll GUI.
You can also use multiple indexes defined by separate configurations, typically to separate personal and shared indexes, or to take advantage of the organization of your data to improve search precision.
The first time you start recoll, you will be asked whether or not you would like it to build the index. If you want to adjust the configuration before indexing, just click Cancel at this point, which will get you into the configuration interface. If you exit, recoll will have created a ~/.recoll directory containing empty configuration files, which you can edit by hand.
The configuration is documented inside the installation chapter of this document, or in the recoll.conf(5) man page, but the most current information will most likely be the comments inside the sample file. The most immediately useful variable you may interested in is probably topdirs, which determines what subtrees get indexed.
The applications needed to index file types other than text, HTML or email (ie: pdf, postscript, ms-word...) are described in the external packages section
Most parameters for a given indexing configuration can be set from a recoll GUI running on this configuration (either as default, or by setting RECOLL_CONFDIR or the -c option.)
The interface is started from the Preferences menu. It has two main panels. The first panel allows setting global variables, like the list of top directories or the list of skipped paths. The second panel allows setting variables that can be redefined for subdirectories. This second panel has an initially empty list of customisation directories, to which you can add. The variables are then set for the currently selected directory (or at the top level if the empty line is selected).
The meaning for most entries in the interface is self-evident and documented by a ToolTip popup on the text label. For more detail, you will need to refer to the configuration section of this guide.
The configuration tool normally respects the comments and most of the formatting inside the configuration file, so that it is quite possible to use it on hand-edited files, which you might nevertheless want to backup first...
Beagle is a concurrent desktop indexer, built on Lucene and the Mono project (C#), for which a number of add-on browser plugins were written. These work by copying visited web pages to an indexing queue directory, which the indexer then processes.
If, for any reason, you so happen to prefer Recoll to Beagle, you can still use the browser plugins (they are written in Javascript and completely independant of C#, Beagle, Lucene...). Recoll can process the Beagle queue directory. Of course, this supposes that Beagle is not running, else both programs will fight for the same files.
This feature can be enabled in the GUI indexing configuration panel, or by editing the configuration file (set processbeaglequeue to 1).
Indexing is performed either by the recollindex program, or by the indexing thread inside the recoll program (use the File menu). Both programs will use the RECOLL_CONFDIR variable or accept a -c confdir option to specify a non-default configuration directory.
If the recoll program finds no index when it starts, it will automatically start indexing (except if canceled).
The indexing process can be interrupted by sending an interrupt (^C, SIGINT) or terminate (SIGTERM) signal. Some time may elapse before the process exits, because it needs to properly flush and close the index. The indexing will restart at the interruption point the next time (the full file tree will still be traversed, but files that were indexed up to the interruption and are still up to date will not need to be reindexed).
After such an interruption, the index will be somewhat inconsistent because some operations which are normally performed at the end of the indexing pass will have been skipped (for exemple, the stemming and spelling databases will be inexistant or out of date). You just need to restart indexing at a later time to restore consistency.
The most common way to set up indexing is to have a cron task execute it every night. For example the following crontab entry would do it every day at 3:30AM (supposing recollindex is in your PATH):
30 3 * * * recollindex > /some/tmp/dir/recolltrace 2>&1Or, using anacron:
1 15 su mylogin -c "recollindex recollindex > /tmp/rcltraceme 2>&1"
The usual command to edit your crontab is crontab -e (which will usually start the vi editor to edit the file). You may have more sophisticated tools available on your system.
Real time monitoring/indexing is performed by starting the recollindex -m command. With this option, recollindex will detach from the terminal and become a daemon, permanently monitoring file changes and updating the index.
The real time indexing support can be customised during package configuration with the --with[out]-fam or --with[out]-inotify options. The default is currently to include inotify monitoring on systems that support it.
The rclmon.sh script can be used to easily start and stop the daemon. It can be found in the examples directory (typically /usr/local/[share/]recoll/examples).
Starting the daemon is normally performed as part of the user session script. For example, my out of fashion xdm-based session has a .xsession script with the following lines at the end:
recollconf=$HOME/.recoll-home recolldata=/usr/local/share/recoll RECOLL_CONFDIR=$recollconf $recolldata/examples/rclmon.sh start fvwm
The indexing daemon gets started, then the window manager, for which the session waits.
By default the indexing daemon will monitor the state of the X11 session, and exit when it finishes, it is not necessary to kill it explicitly. (The X11 server monitoring can be disabled with option -x to recollindex).
Under KDE, you can place a small script to start recollindex -m under $HOME/.kde/Autostart. This will be executed when the session begins.
There is a similar mechanism under Gnome (find the session control tool in the menus and use the "Startup programs" tab).
By default, the messages from the indexing daemon will be discarded. You may want to change this by setting the daemlogfilename and daemloglevel configuration parameters. Also the log file will only be truncated when the daemon starts. If the daemon runs permanently, the log file may grow quite big, depending on the log level.
While it is convenient that data is indexed in real time, repeated indexing can generate a significant load on the system when files such as email folders change. Also, monitoring large file trees by itself significantly taxes system resources. You probably do not want to enable it if your system is short on resources. Periodic indexing is adequate in most cases.
The recoll program provides the main user interface for searching. It is based on the Qt library.
recoll has two search modes:
Simple search (the default, on the main screen) has a single entry field where you can enter multiple words.
Advanced search (a panel accessed through the Tools menu or the toolbox bar icon) shas multiple entry fields, which you may use to build a logical condition, with additional filtering on file type and location in the file system.
In most cases, you can enter the terms as you think them, even if they contain embedded punctuation or other non-textual characters. For exemple, Recoll can handle things like e-mail addresses, or arbitrary cut and paste from another text window, punctation and all.
The main case where you should enter text differently from how it is printed is for east-asian languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean). Words composed of single or multiple characters should be entered separated by white space in this case (they would typically be printed without white space).
Start the recoll program.
Possibly choose a search mode: Any term, All terms, File name or Query language.
Enter search term(s) in the text field at the top of the window.
Click the Search button or hit the Enter key to start the search.
The initial default search mode is All terms. This will look for documents containing all of the search terms (the ones with more terms will get better scores). Any term will search for documents where at least one of the terms appear.
File name will specifically look for file names. The entry will be split at white space characters, and each pattern will be separately expanded. If you want to search for a pattern including white space, use double quotes. The point of having a separate file name search is that wild card expansion can be performed more efficiently on a relatively small subset of the index.
The fourth entry (Query Language) is described in its own section.
All search modes allow wildcards inside terms (*, ?, []). You may want to have a look at the section about wildcards for more information about this.
You can search for exact phrases (adjacent words in a given order) by enclosing the input inside double quotes. Ex: "virtual reality".
Character case has no influence on search, except that you can disable stem expansion for any term by capitalizing it. Ie: a search for floor will also normally look for flooring, floored, etc., but a search for Floor will only look for floor, in any character case. Stemming can also be disabled globally in the preferences.
Recoll remembers the last few searches that you performed. You can use the simple search text entry widget (a combobox) to recall them (click on the thing at the right of the text field). Please note, however, that only the search texts are remembered, not the mode (all/any/file name).
Typing Esc Space while entering a word in the simple search entry will open a window with possible completions for the word. The completions are extracted from the database.
Double-clicking on a word in the result list or a preview window will insert it into the simple search entry field.
You can cut and paste any text into an All terms or Any term search field, punctuation, newlines and all - except for wildcard characters (single ? characters are ok). Recoll will process it and produce a meaningful search. This is what most differentiates this mode from the Query Language mode, where you have to care about the syntax.
You can use the Tools / Advanced search dialog for more complex searches.
After starting a search, a list of results will instantly be displayed in the main list window.
By default, the document list is presented in order of relevance (how well the system estimates that the document matches the query). You can specify a different ordering by using the Tools / Sort parameters dialog.
Clicking on the Preview link for an entry will open an internal preview window for the document. Further Preview clicks for the same search will open tabs in the existing preview window. You can use Shift+Click to force the creation of another preview window, which may be useful to view the documents side by side. (You can also browse successive results in a single preview window by typing Shift+ArrowUp/Down in the window).
Clicking the Open link will attempt to start an external viewer. The viewer for each document type can be configured through the user preferences dialog, or by editing the mimeview configuration file. You can also check the Use desktop preferences option in the user preferences dialog to use the desktop defaults for all documents. This is probably the best option if you are using a well configured Gnome or KDE desktop.
The Preview and Open edit links may not be present for all entries, meaning that Recoll has no configured way to preview a given file type (which was indexed by name only), or no configured external editor for the file type. This can sometimes be adjusted simply by tweaking the mimemap and mimeview configuration files (the latter can be modified with the user preferences dialog).
The format of the result list entries is entirely configurable by using the preference dialog to edit an HTML fragment.
You can click on the Query details link at the top of the results page to see the query actually performed, after stem expansion and other processing.
Double-clicking on any word inside the result list or a preview window will insert it into the simple search text.
The result list is divided into pages (the size of which you can change in the preferences). Use the arrow buttons in the toolbar or the links at the bottom of the page to browse the results.
Apart from the preview and edit links, you can display a pop-up menu by right-clicking over a paragraph in the result list. This menu has the following entries:
Preview
Edit
Copy File Name
Copy Url
Save to File
Find similar
Preview Parent document
Open Parent document
The Preview and Edit entries do the same thing as the corresponding links.
The Copy File Name and Copy Url copy the relevant data to the clipboard, for later pasting.
Save to File allows saving the contents of a result document to a chosen file. This entry will only appear if the document does not correspond to an existing file, but is a subdocument inside such a file (ie: an email attachment). It is especially useful to extract attachments with no associated editor.
The Find similar entry will select a number of relevant term from the current document and enter them into the simple search field. You can then start a simple search, with a good chance of finding documents related to the current result.
The Parent document entries will appear for documents which are not actually files but are part of, or attached to, a higher level document. This entry is mainly useful for email attachments and permits viewing the message to which the document is attached. Note that the entry will also appear for an email which is part of an mbox folder file, but that you can't actually visualize the folder (there will be an error dialog if you try). Recoll is unfortunately not yet smart enough to disable the entry in this case. In other cases, the Open option makes sense, for exemple to start a chm viewer on the parent document for a help page.
The preview window opens when you first click a Preview link inside the result list.
Subsequent preview requests for a given search open new tabs in the existing window (except if you hold the Shift key while clicking which will open a new window for side by side viewing).
Starting another search and requesting a preview will create a new preview window. The old one stays open until you close it.
You can close a preview tab by typing ^W (Ctrl + W) in the window. Closing the last tab for a window will also close the window.
Of course you can also close a preview window by using the window manager button in the top of the frame.
You can display successive or previous documents from the result list inside a preview tab by typing Shift+Down or Shift+Up (Down and Up are the arrow keys).
The preview tabs have an internal incremental search function. You initiate the search either by typing a / (slash) inside the text area or by clicking into the Search for: text field and entering the search string. You can then use the Next and Previous buttons to find the next/previous occurrence. You can also type F3 inside the text area to get to the next occurrence.
If you have a search string entered and you use ^Up/^Down to browse the results, the search is initiated for each successive document. If the string is found, the cursor will be positioned at the first occurrence of the search string.
A right-click menu in the text area allows switching between displaying the main text or the contents of fields associated to the document (ie: author, abtract, etc.). This is especially useful in cases where the term match did not occur in the main text but in one of the fields.
You can print the current preview window contents by typing ^P (Ctrl + P) in the window text.
The query language processor is activated on the simple search entry when the search mode selector is set to Query Language.
The language is roughly based on the Xesam user search language specification.
Here follows a sample request that we are going to explain:
author:"john doe" Beatles OR Lennon Live OR Unplugged -potatoes
This would search for all documents with John Doe appearing as a phrase in the author field (exactly what this is would depend on the document type, ie: the From: header, for an email message), and containing either beatles or lennon and either live or unplugged but not potatoes (in any part of the document).
An element is composed of an optional field specification, and a value, separated by a colon. Exemple: Beatles, author:balzac, dc:title:grandet
The colon, if present, means "contains". Xesam defines other relations, which are not supported for now.
All elements in the search entry are normally combined with an implicit AND. It is possible to specify that elements be OR'ed instead, as in Beatles OR Lennon. The OR must be entered literally (capitals), and it has priority over the AND associations: word1 word2 OR word3 means word1 AND (word2 OR word3) not (word1 AND word2) OR word3. Do not enter explicit parenthesis, they are not supported for now.
An element preceded by a - specifies a term that should not appear. Pure negative queries are forbidden.
As usual, words inside quotes define a phrase (the order of words is significant), so that title:"prejudice pride" is not the same as title:prejudice title:pride, and is unlikely to find a result.
Recoll currently manages the following default fields:
title, subject or caption are synonyms which specify data to be searched for in the document title or subject.
author or from for searching the documents originators.
recipient or to for searching the documents recipients.
keyword for searching the document-specified keywords (few documents actually have any).
filename for the document's file name.
ext specifies the file name extension (Ex: ext:html)
The field syntax also supports a few field-like, but special, criteria:
dir for filtering the results on file location (Ex: dir:/home/me/somedir). Please note that this is quite inefficient, that it may produce very slow searches, and that it may be worth in some cases to set up separate databases instead.
mime or format for specifying the mime type. This one is quite special because you can specify several values which will be OR'ed (the normal default for the language is AND). Ex: mime:text/plain mime:text/html. Specifying an explicit boolean operator or negation (-) before a mime specification is not supported and will produce strange results.
type or rclcat for specifying the category (as in text/media/presentation/etc.). The classification of mime types in categories is defined in the Recoll configuration (mimeconf), and can be modified or extended. The default category names are those which permit filtering results in the main GUI screen. Categories are OR'ed like mime types above.
The document filters used while indexing have the possibility to create other fields with arbitrary names, and aliases may be defined in the configuration, so that the exact field search possibilities may be different for you if someone took care of the customisation.
The query language is currently the only way to use the Recoll field search capability.
Words inside phrases and capitalized words are not stem-expanded. Wildcards may be used anywhere inside a term. Specifying a wild-card on the left of a term can produce a very slow search (or even an incorrect one if the expansion is truncated because of excessive size).
You can use the show query link at the top of the result list to check the exact query which was finally executed by Xapian.
Most Xesam phrase modifiers are unsupported, except for l (small ell) to disable stemming, and p to turn a phrase into a NEAR (unordered) search. Exemple: "prejudice pride"p
The advanced search dialog helps you build more complex queries. It can be opened through the Tools menu or through the main toolbar.
The dialog has three parts:
The top part allows constructing a query by combining multiple clauses of different types. Each entry field is configurable for the following modes:
All terms.
Any term.
None of the terms.
Phrase (exact terms in order within an adjustable window).
Proximity (terms in any order within an adjustable window).
Filename search.
Additional entry fields can be created by clicking the Add clause button.
When searching, the non-empty clauses will be combined either with an AND or an OR conjunction, depending on the choice made on the left (All clauses or Any clause).
Entries of all types except "Phrase" and "Near" accept a mix of single words and phrases enclosed in double quotes. Stemming and wildcard expansion will be performed as for simple search.
The next part allows filtering the results by their mime types.
The state of the file type selection can be saved as the default (the file type filter will not be activated at program start-up, but the lists will be in the restored state).
The bottom part allows restricting the search results to a sub-tree of the indexed area. If you need to do this often, you may think of setting up multiple indexes instead, as the performance will be much better.
Phrases and Proximity searches. These two clauses work in similar ways, with the difference that proximity searches do not impose an order on the words. In both cases, an adjustable number (slack) of non-matched words may be accepted between the searched ones (use the counter on the left to adjust this count). For phrases, the default count is zero (exact match). For proximity it is ten (meaning that two search terms, would be matched if found within a window of twelve words). Examples: a phrase search for quick fox with a slack of 0 will match quick fox but not quick brown fox. With a slack of 1 it will match the latter, but not fox quick. A proximity search for quick fox with the default slack will match the latter, and also a fox is a cunning and quick animal.
Click on the Start Search button in the advanced search dialog, or type Enter in any text field to start the search. The button in the main window always performs a simple search.
Click on the Show query details link at the top of the result page to see the query expansion.
Recoll automatically manages the expansion of search terms to their derivatives (ie: plural/singular, verb inflections). But there are other cases where the exact search term is not known. For example, you may not remember the exact spelling, or only know the beginning of the name.
The term explorer tool (started from the toolbar icon or from the Term explorer entry of the Tools menu) can be used to search the full index terms list. It has three modes of operations:
In this mode of operation, you can enter a search string with shell-like wildcards (*, ?, []). ie: xapi* would display all index terms beginning with xapi. (More about wildcards here).
This mode will accept a regular expression as input. Example: word[0-9]+. The put. Examplhe result list entries is entirely configurable by using the preference dialog to edit an HTML fragment.
You can click on the Query details link at the top of the results page to see the query actually performed, after stem expansion and other processing.
Double-clicking on any word inside the result list or a preview window will insert it into the simple search text.
The result list is divided into pages (the size of which you can change in the preferences). Use the arrow buttons in the toolbar or the links at the bottom of the page to browse the results.
Apart from the preview and edit links, you can display a pop-up menu by right-clicking over a paragraph in the result list. This menu has the following entries:
Preview
Edit
Copy File Name
Copy Url
Save to File
Find similar
Preview Parent document
Open Parent document
The Preview and Edit entries do the same thing as the corresponding links.
The Copy File Name and Copy Url copy the relevant data to the clipboard, for later pasting.
Save to File allows saving the contents of a result document to a chosen file. This entry will only appear if the document does not correspond to an existing file, but is a subdocument inside such a file (ie: an email attachment). It is especially useful to extract attachments with no associated editor.
The Find similar entry will select a number of relevant term from the current document and enter them into the simple search field. You can then start a simple search, with a good chance of finding documents related to the current result.
The Parent document entries will appear for documents which are not actually files but are part of, or attached to, a higher level document. This entry is mainly useful for email attachments and permits viewing the message to which the document is attached. Note that the entry will also appear for an email which is part of an mbox folder file, but that you can't actually visualize the folder (there will be an error dialog if you try). Recoll is unfortunately not yet smart enough to disable the entry in this case. In other cases, the Open option makes sense, for exemple to start a chm viewer on the parent document for a help page.
The preview window opens when you first click a Preview link inside the result list.
Subsequent preview requests for a given search open new tabs in the existing window (except if you hold the Shift key while clicking which will open a new window for side by side viewing).
Starting another search and requesting a preview will create a new preview window. The old one stays open until you close it.
You can close a preview tab by typing ^W (Ctrl + W) in the window. Closing the last tab for a window will also close the window.
Of course you can also close a preview window by using the window manager button in the top of the frame.
You can display successive or previous documents from the result list inside a preview tab by typing Shift+Down or Shift+Up (Down and Up are the arrow keys).
The preview tabs have an internal incremental search function. You initiate the search either by typing a / (slash) inside the text area or by clicking into the Search for: text field and entering the search string. You can then use the Next and Previous buttons to find the next/previous occurrence. You can also type F3 inside the text area to get to the next occurrence.
If you have a search string entered and you use ^Up/^Down to browse the results, the search is initiated for each successive document. If the string is found, the cursor will be positioned at the first occurrence of the search string.
A right-click menu in the text area allows switching between displaying the main text or the contents of fields associated to the document (ie: author, abtract, etc.). This is especially useful in cases where the term match did not occur in the main text but in one of the fields.
You can print the current preview window contents by typing ^P (Ctrl + P) in the window text.
The query language processor is activated on the simple search entry when the search mode selector is set to Query Language.
The language is roughly based on the Xesam user search language specification.
Here follows a sample request that we are going to explain:
author:"john doe" Beatles OR Lennon Live OR Unplugged -potatoes
This would search for all documents with John Doe appearing as a phrase in the author field (exactly what this is would depend on the document type, ie: the From: header, for an email message), and containing either beatles or lennon and either live or unplugged but not potatoes (in any part of the document).
An element is composed of an optional field specification, and a value, separated by a colon. Exemple: Beatles, author:balzac, dc:title:grandet
The colon, if present, means "contains". Xesam defines other relations, which are not supported for now.
All elements in the search entry are normally combined with an implicit AND. It is possible to specify that elements be OR'ed instead, as in Beatles OR Lennon. The OR must be entered literally (capitals), and it has priority over the AND associations: word1 word2 OR word3 means word1 AND (word2 OR word3) not (word1 AND word2) OR word3. Do not enter explicit parenthesis, they are not supported for now.
An element preceded by a - specifies a term that should not appear. Pure negative queries are forbidden.
As usual, words inside quotes define a phrase (the order of words is significant), so that title:"prejudice pride" is not the same as title:prejudice title:pride, and is unlikely to find a result.
Recoll currently manages the following default fields:
title, subject or caption are synonyms which specify data to be searched for in the document title or subject.
author or from for searching the documents originators.
recipient or to for searching the documents recipients.
keyword for searching the document-specified keywords (few documents actually have any).
filename for the document's file name.
ext specifies the file name extension (Ex: ext:html)
The field syntax also supports a few field-like, but special, criteria:
dir for filtering the results on file location (Ex: dir:/home/me/somedir). Please note that this is quite inefficient, that it may produce very slow searches, and that it may be worth in some cases to set up separate databases instead.
mime or format for specifying the mime type. This one is quite special because you can specify several values which will be OR'ed (the normal default for the language is AND). Ex: mime:text/plain mime:text/html. Specifying an explicit boolean operator or negation (-) before a mime specification is not supported and will produce strange results.
type or rclcat for specifying the category (as in text/media/presentation/etc.). The classification of mime types in categories is defined in the Recoll configuration (mimeconf), and can be modified or extended. The default category names are those which permit filtering results in the main GUI screen. Categories are OR'ed like mime types above.
The document filters used while indexing have the possibility to create other fields with arbitrary names, and aliases may be defined in the configuration, so that the exact field search possibilities may be different for you if someone took care of the customisation.
The query language is currently the only way to use the Recoll field search capability.
Words inside phrases and capitalized words are not stem-expanded. Wildcards may be used anywhere inside a term. Specifying a wild-card on the left of a term can produce a very slow search (or even an incorrect one if the expansion is truncated because of excessive size).
You can use the show query link at the top of the result list to check the exact query which was finally executed by Xapian.
Most Xesam phrase modifiers are unsupported, except for l (small ell) to disable stemming, and p to turn a phrase into a NEAR (unordered) search. Exemple: "prejudice pride"p
The advanced search dialog helps you build more complex queries. It can be opened through the Tools menu or through the main toolbar.
The dialog has three parts:
The top part allows constructing a query by combining multiple clauses of different types. Each entry field is configurable for the following modes:
All terms.
Any term.
None of the terms.
Phrase (exact terms in order within an adjustable window).
Proximity (terms in any order within an adjustable window).
Filename search.
Additional entry fields can be created by clicking the Add clause button.
When searching, the non-empty clauses will be combined either with an AND or an OR conjunction, depending on the choice made on the left (All clauses or Any clause).
Entries of all types except "Phrase" and "Near" accept a mix of single words and phrases enclosed in double quotes. Stemming and wildcard expansion will be performed as for simple search.
The next part allows filtering the results by their mime types.
The state of the file type selection can be saved as the default (the file type filter will not be activated at program start-up, but the lists will be in the restored state).
The bottom part allows restricting the search results to a sub-tree of the indexed area. If you need to do this often, you may think of setting up multiple indexes instead, as the performance will be much better.
Phrases and Proximity searches. These two clauses work in similar ways, with the difference that proximity searches do not impose an order on the words. In both cases, an adjustable number (slack) of non-matched words may be accepted between the searched ones (use the counter on the left to adjust this count). For phrases, the default count is zero (exact match). For proximity it is ten (meaning that two search terms, would be matched if found within a window of twelve words). Examples: a phrase search for quick fox with a slack of 0 will match quick fox but not quick brown fox. With a slack of 1 it will match the latter, but not fox quick. A proximity search for quick fox with the default slack will match the latter, and also a fox is a cunning and quick animal.
Click on the Start Search button in the advanced search dialog, or type Enter in any text field to start the search. The button in the main window always performs a simple search.
Click on the Show query details link at the top of the result page to see the query expansion.
Recoll automatically manages the expansion of search terms to their derivatives (ie: plural/singular, verb inflections). But there are other cases where the exact search term is not known. For example, you may not remember the exact spelling, or only know the beginning of the name.
The term explorer tool (started from the toolbar icon or from the Term explorer entry of the Tools menu) can be used to search the full index terms list. It has three modes of operations:
In this mode of operation, you can enter a search string with shell-like wildcards (*, ?, []). ie: xapi* would display all index terms beginning with xapi. (More about wildcards here).
This mode will accept a regular expression as input. Example: word[0-9]+. The put. Examplhe result list entries is entirely configurable by using the preference dialog to edit an HTML fragment.
You can click on the Query details link at the top of the results page to see the query actually performed, after stem expansion and other processing.
Double-clicking on any word inside the result list or a preview window will insert it into the simple search text.
The result list is divided into pages (the size of which you can change in the preferences). Use the arrow buttons in the toolbar or the links at the bottom of the page to browse the results.
Apart from the preview and edit links, you can display a pop-up menu by right-clicking over a paragraph in the result list. This menu has the following entries:
Preview
Edit
Copy File Name
Copy Url
Save to File
Find similar
Preview Parent document
Open Parent document
The Preview and Edit entries do the same thing as the corresponding links.
The Copy File Name and Copy Url copy the relevant data to the clipboard, for later pasting.
Save to File allows saving the contents of a result document to a chosen file. This entry will only appear if the document does not correspond to an existing file, but is a subdocument inside such a file (ie: an email attachment). It is especially useful to extract attachments with no associated editor.
The Find similar entry will select a number of relevant term from the current document and enter them into the simple search field. You can then start a simple search, with a good chance of finding documents related to the current result.
The Parent document entries will appear for documents which are not actually files but are part of, or attached to, a higher level document. This entry is mainly useful for email attachments and permits viewing the message to which the document is attached. Note that the entry will also appear for an email which is part of an mbox folder file, but that you can't actually visualize the folder (there will be an error dialog if you try). Recoll is unfortunately not yet smart enough to disable the entry in this case. In other cases, the Open option makes sense, for exemple to start a chm viewer on the parent document for a help page.
The preview window opens when you first click a Preview link inside the result list.
Subsequent preview requests for a given search open new tabs in the existing window (except if you hold the Shift key while clicking which will open a new window for side by side viewing).
Starting another search and requesting a preview will create a new preview window. The old one stays open until you close it.
You can close a preview tab by typing ^W (Ctrl + W) in the window. Closing the last tab for a window will also close the window.
Of course you can also close a preview window by using the window manager button in the top of the frame.
You can display successive or previous documents from the result list inside a preview tab by typing Shift+Down or Shift+Up (Down and Up are the arrow keys).
The preview tabs have an internal incremental search function. You initiate the search either by typing a / (slash) inside the text area or by clicking into the Search for: text field and entering the search string. You can then use the Next and Previous buttons to find the next/previous occurrence. You can also type F3 inside the text area to get to the next occurrence.
If you have a search string entered and you use ^Up/^Down to browse the results, the search is initiated for each successive document. If the string is found, the cursor will be positioned at the first occurrence of the search string.
A right-click menu in the text area allows switching between displaying the main text or the contents of fields associated to the document (ie: author, abtract, etc.). This is especially useful in cases where the term match did not occur in the main text but in one of the fields.
You can print the current preview window contents by typing ^P (Ctrl + P) in the window text.
The query language processor is activated on the simple search entry when the search mode selector is set to Query Language.
The language is roughly based on the Xesam user search language specification.
Here follows a sample request that we are going to explain:
author:"john doe" Beatles OR Lennon Live OR Unplugged -potatoes
This would search for all documents with John Doe appearing as a phrase in the author field (exactly what this is would depend on the document type, ie: the From: header, for an email message), and containing either beatles or lennon and either live or unplugged but not potatoes (in any part of the document).
An element is composed of an optional field specification, and a value, separated by a colon. Exemple: Beatles, author:balzac, dc:title:grandet
The colon, if present, means "contains". Xesam defines other relations, which are not supported for now.
All elements in the search entry are normally combined with an implicit AND. It is possible to specify that elements be OR'ed instead, as in Beatles OR Lennon. The OR must be entered literally (capitals), and it has priority over the AND associations: word1 word2 OR word3 means word1 AND (word2 OR word3) not (word1 AND word2) OR word3. Do not enter explicit parenthesis, they are not supported for now.
An element preceded by a - specifies a term that should not appear. Pure negative queries are forbidden.
As usual, words inside quotes define a phrase (the order of words is significant), so that title:"prejudice pride" is not the same as title:prejudice title:pride, and is unlikely to find a result.
Recoll currently manages the following default fields:
title, subject or caption are synonyms which specify data to be searched for in the document title or subject.
author or from for searching the documents originators.
recipient or to for searching the documents recipients.
keyword for searching the document-specified keywords (few documents actually have any).
filename for the document's file name.
ext specifies the file name extension (Ex: ext:html)
The field syntax also supports a few field-like, but special, criteria:
dir for filtering the results on file location (Ex: dir:/home/me/somedir). Please note that this is quite inefficient, that it may produce very slow searches, and that it may be worth in some cases to set up separate databases instead.
mime or format for specifying the mime type. This one is quite special because you can specify several values which will be OR'ed (the normal default for the language is AND). Ex: mime:text/plain mime:text/html. Specifying an explicit boolean operator or negation (-) before a mime specification is not supported and will produce strange results.
type or rclcat for specifying the category (as in text/media/presentation/etc.). The classification of mime types in categories is defined in the Recoll configuration (mimeconf), and can be modified or extended. The default category names are those which permit filtering results in the main GUI screen. Categories are OR'ed like mime types above.
The document filters used while indexing have the possibility to create other fields with arbitrary names, and aliases may be defined in the configuration, so that the exact field search possibilities may be different for you if someone took care of the customisation.
The query language is currently the only way to use the Recoll field search capability.
Words inside phrases and capitalized words are not stem-expanded. Wildcards may be used anywhere inside a term. Specifying a wild-card on the left of a term can produce a very slow search (or even an incorrect one if the expansion is truncated because of excessive size).
You can use the show query link at the top of the result list to check the exact query which was finally executed by Xapian.
Most Xesam phrase modifiers are unsupported, except for l (small ell) to disable stemming, and p to turn a phrase into a NEAR (unordered) search. Exemple: "prejudice pride"p
The advanced search dialog helps you build more complex queries. It can be opened through the Tools menu or through the main toolbar.
The dialog has three parts:
The top part allows constructing a query by combining multiple clauses of different types. Each entry field is configurable for the following modes:
All terms.
Any term.
None of the terms.
Phrase (exact terms in order within an adjustable window).
Proximity (terms in any order within an adjustable window).
Filename search.
Additional entry fields can be created by clicking the Add clause button.
When searching, the non-empty clauses will be combined either with an AND or an OR conjunction, depending on the choice made on the left (All clauses or Any clause).
Entries of all types except "Phrase" and "Near" accept a mix of single words and phrases enclosed in double quotes. Stemming and wildcard expansion will be performed as for simple search.
The next part allows filtering the results by their mime types.
The state of the file type selection can be saved as the default (the file type filter will not be activated at program start-up, but the lists will be in the restored state).
The bottom part allows restricting the search results to a sub-tree of the indexed area. If you need to do this often, you may think of setting up multiple indexes instead, as the performance will be much better.
Phrases and Proximity searches. These two clauses work in similar ways, with the difference that proximity searches do not impose an order on the words. In both cases, an adjustable number (slack) of non-matched words may be accepted between the searched ones (use the counter on the left to adjust this count). For phrases, the default count is zero (exact match). For proximity it is ten (meaning that two search terms, would be matched if found within a window of twelve words). Examples: a phrase search for quick fox with a slack of 0 will match quick fox but not quick brown fox. With a slack of 1 it will match the latter, but not fox quick. A proximity search for quick fox with the default slack will match the latter, and also a fox is a cunning and quick animal.
Click on the Start Search button in the advanced search dialog, or type Enter in any text field to start the search. The button in the main window always performs a simple search.
Click on the Show query details link at the top of the result page to see the query expansion.
Recoll automatically manages the expansion of search terms to their derivatives (ie: plural/singular, verb inflections). But there are other cases where the exact search term is not known. For example, you may not remember the exact spelling, or only know the beginning of the name.
The term explorer tool (started from the toolbar icon or from the Term explorer entry of the Tools menu) can be used to search the full index terms list. It has three modes of operations:
In this mode of operation, you can enter a search string with shell-like wildcards (*, ?, []). ie: xapi* would display all index terms beginning with xapi. (More about wildcards here).
This mode will accept a regular expression as input. Example: word[0-9]+. The put. Examplhe result list entries is entirely configurable by using the preference dialog to edit an HTML fragment.
You can click on the Query details link at the top of the results page to see the query actually performed, after stem expansion and other processing.
Double-clicking on any word inside the result list or a preview window will insert it into the simple search text.
The result list is divided into pages (the size of which you can change in the preferences). Use the arrow buttons in the toolbar or the links at the bottom of the page to browse the results.
Apart from the preview and edit links, you can display a pop-up menu by right-clicking over a paragraph in the result list. This menu has the following entries:
Preview
Edit
Copy File Name
Copy Url
Save to File
Find similar
Preview Parent document
Open Parent document
The Preview and Edit entries do the same thing as the corresponding links.
The Copy File Name and Copy Url copy the relevant data to the clipboard, for later pasting.
Save to File allows saving the contents of a result document to a chosen file. This entry will only appear if the document does not correspond to an existing file, but is a subdocument inside such a file (ie: an email attachment). It is especially useful to extract attachments with no associated editor.
The Find similar entry will select a number of relevant term from the current document and enter them into the simple search field. You can then start a simple search, with a good chance of finding documents related to the current result.
The Parent document entries will appear for documents which are not actually files but are part of, or attached to, a higher level document. This entry is mainly useful for email attachments and permits viewing the message to which the document is attached. Note that the entry will also appear for an email which is part of an mbox folder file, but that you can't actually visualize the folder (there will be an error dialog if you try). Recoll is unfortunately not yet smart enough to disable the entry in this case. In other cases, the Open option makes sense, for exemple to start a chm viewer on the parent document for a help page.
The preview window opens when you first click a Preview link inside the result list.
Subsequent preview requests for a given search open new tabs in the existing window (except if you hold the Shift key while clicking which will open a new window for side by side viewing).
Starting another search and requesting a preview will create a new preview window. The old one stays open until you close it.
You can close a preview tab by typing ^W (Ctrl + W) in the window. Closing the last tab for a window will also close the window.
Of course you can also close a preview window by using the window manager button in the top of the frame.
You can display successive or previous documents from the result list inside a preview tab by typing Shift+Down or Shift+Up (Down and Up are the arrow keys).
The preview tabs have an internal incremental search function. You initiate the search either by typing a / (slash) inside the text area or by clicking into the Search for: text field and entering the search string. You can then use the Next and Previous buttons to find the next/previous occurrence. You can also type F3 inside the text area to get to the next occurrence.
If you have a search string entered and you use ^Up/^Down to browse the results, the search is initiated for each successive document. If the string is found, the cursor will be positioned at the first occurrence of the search string.
A right-click menu in the text area allows switching between displaying the main text or the contents of fields associated to the document (ie: author, abtract, etc.). This is especially useful in cases where the term match did not occur in the main text but in one of the fields.
You can print the current preview window contents by typing ^P (Ctrl + P) in the window text.
The query language processor is activated on the simple search entry when the search mode selector is set to Query Language.
The language is roughly based on the Xesam user search language specification.
Here follows a sample request that we are going to explain:
author:"john doe" Beatles OR Lennon Live OR Unplugged -potatoes
This would search for all documents with John Doe appearing as a phrase in the author field (exactly what this is would depend on the document type, ie: the From: header, for an email message), and containing either beatles or lennon and either live or unplugged but not potatoes (in any part of the document).
An element is composed of an optional field specification, and a value, separated by a colon. Exemple: Beatles, author:balzac, dc:title:grandet
The colon, if present, means "contains". Xesam defines other relations, which are not supported for now.
All elements in the search entry are normally combined with an implicit AND. It is possible to specify that elements be OR'ed instead, as in Beatles OR Lennon. The OR must be entered literally (capitals), and it has priority over the AND associations: word1 word2 OR word3 means word1 AND (word2 OR word3) not (word1 AND word2) OR word3. Do not enter explicit parenthesis, they are not supported for now.
An element preceded by a - specifies a term that should not appear. Pure negative queries are forbidden.
As usual, words inside quotes define a phrase (the order of words is significant), so that title:"prejudice pride" is not the same as title:prejudice title:pride, and is unlikely to find a result.
Recoll currently manages the following default fields:
title, subject or caption are synonyms which specify data to be searched for in the document title or subject.
author or from for searching the documents originators.
recipient or to for searching the documents recipients.
keyword for searching the document-specified keywords (few documents actually have any).
filename for the document's file name.
ext specifies the file name extension (Ex: ext:html)
The field syntax also supports a few field-like, but special, criteria:
dir for filtering the results on file location (Ex: dir:/home/me/somedir). Please note that this is quite inefficient, that it may produce very slow searches, and that it may be worth in some cases to set up separate databases instead.
mime or format for specifying the mime type. This one is quite special because you can specify several values which will be OR'ed (the normal default for the language is AND). Ex: mime:text/plain mime:text/html. Specifying an explicit boolean operator or negation (-) before a mime specification is not supported and will produce strange results.
type or rclcat for specifying the category (as in text/media/presentation/etc.). The classification of mime types in categories is defined in the Recoll configuration (mimeconf), and can be modified or extended. The default category names are those which permit filtering results in the main GUI screen. Categories are OR'ed like mime types above.
The document filters used while indexing have the possibility to create other fields with arbitrary names, and aliases may be defined in the configuration, so that the exact field search possibilities may be different for you if someone took care of the customisation.
The query language is currently the only way to use the Recoll field search capability.
Words inside phrases and capitalized words are not stem-expanded. Wildcards may be used anywhere inside a term. Specifying a wild-card on the left of a term can produce a very slow search (or even an incorrect one if the expansion is truncated because of excessive size).
You can use the show query link at the top of the result list to check the exact query which was finally executed by Xapian.
Most Xesam phrase modifiers are unsupported, except for l (small ell) to disable stemming, and p to turn a phrase into a NEAR (unordered) search. Exemple: "prejudice pride"p
The advanced search dialog helps you build more complex queries. It can be opened through the Tools menu or through the main toolbar.
The dialog has three parts:
The top part allows constructing a query by combining multiple clauses of different types. Each entry field is configurable for the following modes:
All terms.
Any term.
None of the terms.
Phrase (exact terms in order within an adjustable window).
Proximity (terms in any order within an adjustable window).
Filename search.
Additional entry fields can be created by clicking the Add clause button.
When searching, the non-empty clauses will be combined either with an AND or an OR conjunction, depending on the choice made on the left (All clauses or Any clause).
Entries of all types except "Phrase" and "Near" accept a mix of single words and phrases enclosed in double quotes. Stemming and wildcard expansion will be performed as for simple search.
The next part allows filtering the results by their mime types.
The state of the file type selection can be saved as the default (the file type filter will not be activated at program start-up, but the lists will be in the restored state).
The bottom part allows restricting the search results to a sub-tree of the indexed area. If you need to do this often, you may think of setting up multiple indexes instead, as the performance will be much better.
Phrases and Proximity searches. These two clauses work in similar ways, with the difference that proximity searches do not impose an order on the words. In both cases, an adjustable number (slack) of non-matched words may be accepted between the searched ones (use the counter on the left to adjust this count). For phrases, the default count is zero (exact match). For proximity it is ten (meaning that two search terms, would be matched if found within a window of twelve words). Examples: a phrase search for quick fox with a slack of 0 will match quick fox but not quick brown fox. With a slack of 1 it will match the latter, but not fox quick. A proximity search for quick fox with the default slack will match the latter, and also a fox is a cunning and quick animal.
Click on the Start Search button in the advanced search dialog, or type Enter in any text field to start the search. The button in the main window always performs a simple search.
Click on the Show query details link at the top of the result page to see the query expansion.
Recoll automatically manages the expansion of search terms to their derivatives (ie: plural/singular, verb inflections). But there are other cases where the exact search term is not known. For example, you may not remember the exact spelling, or only know the beginning of the name.
The term explorer tool (started from the toolbar icon or from the Term explorer entry of the Tools menu) can be used to search the full index terms list. It has three modes of operations:
In this mode of operation, you can enter a search string with shell-like wildcards (*, ?, []). ie: xapi* would display all index terms beginning with xapi. (More about wildcards here).
This mode will accept a regular expression as input. Example: word[0-9]+. The put. Examplhe result list entries is entirely configurable by using the preference dialog to edit an HTML fragment.
You can click on the Query details link at the top of the results page to see the query actually performed, after stem expansion and other processing.
Double-clicking on any word inside the result list or a preview window will insert it into the simple search text.
The result list is divided into pages (the size of which you can change in the preferences). Use the arrow buttons in the toolbar or the links at the bottom of the page to browse the results.
Apart from the preview and edit links, you can display a pop-up menu by right-clicking over a paragraph in the result list. This menu has the following entries:
Preview
Edit
Copy File Name
Copy Url
Save to File
Find similar
Preview Parent document
Open Parent document
The Preview and Edit entries do the same thing as the corresponding links.
The Copy File Name and Copy Url copy the relevant data to the clipboard, for later pasting.
Save to File allows saving the contents of a result document to a chosen file. This entry will only appear if the document does not correspond to an existing file, but is a subdocument inside such a file (ie: an email attachment). It is especially useful to extract attachments with no associated editor.
The Find similar entry will select a number of relevant term from the current document and enter them into the simple search field. You can then start a simple search, with a good chance of finding documents related to the current result.
The Parent document entries will appear for documents which are not actually files but are part of, or attached to, a higher level document. This entry is mainly useful for email attachments and permits viewing the message to which the document is attached. Note that the entry will also appear for an email which is part of an mbox folder file, but that you can't actually visualize the folder (there will be an error dialog if you try). Recoll is unfortunately not yet smart enough to disable the entry in this case. In other cases, the Open option makes sense, for exemple to start a chm viewer on the parent document for a help page.
The preview window opens when you first click a Preview link inside the result list.
Subsequent preview requests for a given search open new tabs in the existing window (except if you hold the Shift key while clicking which will open a new window for side by side viewing).
Starting another search and requesting a preview will create a new preview window. The old one stays open until you close it.
You can close a preview tab by typing ^W (Ctrl + W) in the window. Closing the last tab for a window will also close the window.
Of course you can also close a preview window by using the window manager button in the top of the frame.
You can display successive or previous documents from the result list inside a preview tab by typing Shift+Down or Shift+Up (Down and Up are the arrow keys).
The preview tabs have an internal incremental search function. You initiate the search either by typing a / (slash) inside the text area or by clicking into the Search for: text field and entering the search string. You can then use the Next and Previous buttons to find the next/previous occurrence. You can also type F3 inside the text area to get to the next occurrence.
If you have a search string entered and you use ^Up/^Down to browse the results, the search is initiated for each successive document. If the string is found, the cursor will be positioned at the first occurrence of the search string.
A right-click menu in the text area allows switching between displaying the main text or the contents of fields associated to the document (ie: author, abtract, etc.). This is especially useful in cases where the term match did not occur in the main text but in one of the fields.
You can print the current preview window contents by typing ^P (Ctrl + P) in the window text.
The query language processor is activated on the simple search entry when the search mode selector is set to Query Language.
The language is roughly based on the Xesam user search language specification.
Here follows a sample request that we are going to explain:
author:"john doe" Beatles OR Lennon Live OR Unplugged -potatoes
This would search for all documents with John Doe appearing as a phrase in the author field (exactly what this is would depend on the document type, ie: the From: header, for an email message), and containing either beatles or lennon and either live or unplugged but not potatoes (in any part of the document).
An element is composed of an optional field specification, and a value, separated by a colon. Exemple: Beatles, author:balzac, dc:title:grandet
The colon, if present, means "contains". Xesam defines other relations, which are not supported for now.
All elements in the search entry are normally combined with an implicit AND. It is possible to specify that elements be OR'ed instead, as in Beatles OR Lennon. The OR must be entered literally (capitals), and it has priority over the AND associations: word1 word2 OR word3 means word1 AND (word2 OR word3) not (word1 AND word2) OR word3. Do not enter explicit parenthesis, they are not supported for now.
An element preceded by a - specifies a term that should not appear. Pure negative queries are forbidden.
As usual, words inside quotes define a phrase (the order of words is significant), so that title:"prejudice pride" is not the same as title:prejudice title:pride, and is unlikely to find a result.
Recoll currently manages the following default fields:
title, subject or caption are synonyms which specify data to be searched for in the document title or subject.
author or from for searching the documents originators.
recipient or to for searching the documents recipients.
keyword for searching the document-specified keywords (few documents actually have any).
filename for the document's file name.
ext specifies the file name extension (Ex: ext:html)
The field syntax also supports a few field-like, but special, criteria:
dir for filtering the results on file location (Ex: dir:/home/me/somedir). Please note that this is quite inefficient, that it may produce very slow searches, and that it may be worth in some cases to set up separate databases instead.
mime or format for specifying the mime type. This one is quite special because you can specify several values which will be OR'ed (the normal default for the language is AND). Ex: mime:text/plain mime:text/html. Specifying an explicit boolean operator or negation (-) before a mime specification is not supported and will produce strange results.
type or rclcat for specifying the category (as in text/media/presentation/etc.). The classification of mime types in categories is defined in the Recoll configuration (mimeconf), and can be modified or extended. The default category names are those which permit filtering results in the main GUI screen. Categories are OR'ed like mime types above.
The document filters used while indexing have the possibility to create other fields with arbitrary names, and aliases may be defined in the configuration, so that the exact field search possibilities may be different for you if someone took care of the customisation.
The query language is currently the only way to use the Recoll field search capability.
Words inside phrases and capitalized words are not stem-expanded. Wildcards may be used anywhere inside a term. Specifying a wild-card on the left of a term can produce a very slow search (or even an incorrect one if the expansion is truncated because of excessive size).
You can use the show query link at the top of the result list to check the exact query which was finally executed by Xapian.
Most Xesam phrase modifiers are unsupported, except for l (small ell) to disable stemming, and p to turn a phrase into a NEAR (unordered) search. Exemple: "prejudice pride"p
The advanced search dialog helps you build more complex queries. It can be opened through the Tools menu or through the main toolbar.
The dialog has three parts:
The top part allows constructing a query by combining multiple clauses of different types. Each entry field is configurable for the following modes:
All terms.
Any term.
None of the terms.
Phrase (exact terms in order within an adjustable window).
Proximity (terms in any order within an adjustable window).
Filename search.
Additional entry fields can be created by clicking the Add clause button.
When searching, the non-empty clauses will be combined either with an AND or an OR conjunction, depending on the choice made on the left (All clauses or Any clause).
Entries of all types except "Phrase" and "Near" accept a mix of single words and phrases enclosed in double quotes. Stemming and wildcard expansion will be performed as for simple search.
The next part allows filtering the results by their mime types.
The state of the file type selection can be saved as the default (the file type filter will not be activated at program start-up, but the lists will be in the restored state).
The bottom part allows restricting the search results to a sub-tree of the indexed area. If you need to do this often, you may think of setting up multiple indexes instead, as the performance will be much better.
Phrases and Proximity searches. These two clauses work in similar ways, with the difference that proximity searches do not impose an order on the words. In both cases, an adjustable number (slack) of non-matched words may be accepted between the searched ones (use the counter on the left to adjust this count). For phrases, the default count is zero (exact match). For proximity it is ten (meaning that two search terms, would be matched if found within a window of twelve words). Examples: a phrase search for quick fox with a slack of 0 will match quick fox but not quick brown fox. With a slack of 1 it will match the latter, but not fox quick. A proximity search for quick fox with the default slack will match the latter, and also a fox is a cunning and quick animal.
Click on the Start Search button in the advanced search dialog, or type Enter in any text field to start the search. The button in the main window always performs a simple search.
Click on the Show query details link at the top of the result page to see the query expansion.
Recoll automatically manages the expansion of search terms to their derivatives (ie: plural/singular, verb inflections). But there are other cases where the exact search term is not known. For example, you may not remember the exact spelling, or only know the beginning of the name.
The term explorer tool (started from the toolbar icon or from the Term explorer entry of the Tools menu) can be used to search the full index terms list. It has three modes of operations:
In this mode of operation, you can enter a search string with shell-like wildcards (*, ?, []). ie: xapi* would display all index terms beginning with xapi. (More about wildcards here).
This mode will accept a regular expression as input. Example: word[0-9]+. The put. Examplhe result list entries is entirely configurable by using the preference dialog to edit an HTML fragment.
You can click on the Query details link at the top of the results page to see the query actually performed, after stem expansion and other processing.
Double-clicking on any word inside the result list or a preview window will insert it into the simple search text.
The result list is divided into pages (the size of which you can change in the preferences). Use the arrow buttons in the toolbar or the links at the bottom of the page to browse the results.
Apart from the preview and edit links, you can display a pop-up menu by right-clicking over a paragraph in the result list. This menu has the following entries:
Preview
Edit
Copy File Name
Copy Url
Save to File
Find similar
Preview Parent document
Open Parent document
The Preview and Edit entries do the same thing as the corresponding links.
The Copy File Name and Copy Url copy the relevant data to the clipboard, for later pasting.
Save to File allows saving the contents of a result document to a chosen file. This entry will only appear if the document does not correspond to an existing file, but is a subdocument inside such a file (ie: an email attachment). It is especially useful to extract attachments with no associated editor.
The Find similar entry will select a number of relevant term from the current document and enter them into the simple search field. You can then start a simple search, with a good chance of finding documents related to the current result.
The Parent document entries will appear for documents which are not actually files but are part of, or attached to, a higher level document. This entry is mainly useful for email attachments and permits viewing the message to which the document is attached. Note that the entry will also appear for an email which is part of an mbox folder file, but that you can't actually visualize the folder (there will be an error dialog if you try). Recoll is unfortunately not yet smart enough to disable the entry in this case. In other cases, the Open option makes sense, for exemple to start a chm viewer on the parent document for a help page.
The preview window opens when you first click a Preview link inside the result list.
Subsequent preview requests for a given search open new tabs in the existing window (except if you hold the Shift key while clicking which will open a new window for side by side viewing).
Starting another search and requesting a preview will create a new preview window. The old one stays open until you close it.
You can close a preview tab by typing ^W (Ctrl + W) in the window. Closing the last tab for a window will also close the window.
Of course you can also close a preview window by using the window manager button in the top of the frame.
You can display successive or previous documents from the result list inside a preview tab by typing Shift+Down or Shift+Up (Down and Up are the arrow keys).
The preview tabs have an internal incremental search function. You initiate the search either by typing a / (slash) inside the text area or by clicking into the Search for: text field and entering the search string. You can then use the Next and Previous buttons to find the next/previous occurrence. You can also type F3 inside the text area to get to the next occurrence.
If you have a search string entered and you use ^Up/^Down to browse the results, the search is initiated for each successive document. If the string is found, the cursor will be positioned at the first occurrence of the search string.
A right-click menu in the text area allows switching between displaying the main text or the contents of fields associated to the document (ie: author, abtract, etc.). This is especially useful in cases where the term match did not occur in the main text but in one of the fields.
You can print the current preview window contents by typing ^P (Ctrl + P) in the window text.
The query language processor is activated on the simple search entry when the search mode selector is set to Query Language.
The language is roughly based on the Xesam user search language specification.
Here follows a sample request that we are going to explain:
author:"john doe" Beatles OR Lennon Live OR Unplugged -potatoes
This would search for all documents with John Doe appearing as a phrase in the author field (exactly what this is would depend on the document type, ie: the From: header, for an email message), and containing either beatles or lennon and either live or unplugged but not potatoes (in any part of the document).
An element is composed of an optional field specification, and a value, separated by a colon. Exemple: Beatles, author:balzac, dc:title:grandet
The colon, if present, means "contains". Xesam defines other relations, which are not supported for now.
All elements in the search entry are normally combined with an implicit AND. It is possible to specify that elements be OR'ed instead, as in Beatles OR Lennon. The OR must be entered literally (capitals), and it has priority over the AND associations: word1 word2 OR word3 means word1 AND (word2 OR word3) not (word1 AND word2) OR word3. Do not enter explicit parenthesis, they are not supported for now.
An element preceded by a - specifies a term that should not appear. Pure negative queries are forbidden.
As usual, words inside quotes define a phrase (the order of words is significant), so that title:"prejudice pride" is not the same as title:prejudice title:pride, and is unlikely to find a result.
Recoll currently manages the following default fields:
title, subject or caption are synonyms which specify data to be searched for in the document title or subject.
author or from for searching the documents originators.
recipient or to for searching the documents recipients.
keyword for searching the document-specified keywords (few documents actually have any).
filename for the document's file name.
ext specifies the file name extension (Ex: ext:html)
The field syntax also supports a few field-like, but special, criteria:
dir for filtering the results on file location (Ex: dir:/home/me/somedir). Please note that this is quite inefficient, that it may produce very slow searches, and that it may be worth in some cases to set up separate databases instead.
mime or format for specifying the mime type. This one is quite special because you can specify several values which will be OR'ed (the normal default for the language is AND). Ex: mime:text/plain mime:text/html. Specifying an explicit boolean operator or negation (-) before a mime specification is not supported and will produce strange results.
type or rclcat for specifying the category (as in text/media/presentation/etc.). The classification of mime types in categories is defined in the Recoll configuration (mimeconf), and can be modified or extended. The default category names are those which permit filtering results in the main GUI screen. Categories are OR'ed like mime types above.
The document filters used while indexing have the possibility to create other fields with arbitrary names, and aliases may be defined in the configuration, so that the exact field search possibilities may be different for you if someone took care of the customisation.
The query language is currently the only way to use the Recoll field search capability.
Words inside phrases and capitalized words are not stem-expanded. Wildcards may be used anywhere inside a term. Specifying a wild-card on the left of a term can produce a very slow search (or even an incorrect one if the expansion is truncated because of excessive size).
You can use the show query link at the top of the result list to check the exact query which was finally executed by Xapian.
Most Xesam phrase modifiers are unsupported, except for l (small ell) to disable stemming, and p to turn a phrase into a NEAR (unordered) search. Exemple: "prejudice pride"p
The advanced search dialog helps you build more complex queries. It can be opened through the Tools menu or through the main toolbar.
The dialog has three parts:
The top part allows constructing a query by combining multiple clauses of different types. Each entry field is configurable for the following modes:
All terms.
Any term.
None of the terms.
Phrase (exact terms in order within an adjustable window).
Proximity (terms in any order within an adjustable window).
Filename search.
Additional entry fields can be created by clicking the Add clause button.
When searching, the non-empty clauses will be combined either with an AND or an OR conjunction, depending on the choice made on the left (All clauses or Any clause).
Entries of all types except "Phrase" and "Near" accept a mix of single words and phrases enclosed in double quotes. Stemming and wildcard expansion will be performed as for simple search.
The next part allows filtering the results by their mime types.
The state of the file type selection can be saved as the default (the file type filter will not be activated at program start-up, but the lists will be in the restored state).
The bottom part allows restricting the search results to a sub-tree of the indexed area. If you need to do this often, you may think of setting up multiple indexes instead, as the performance will be much better.
Phrases and Proximity searches. These two clauses work in similar ways, with the difference that proximity searches do not impose an order on the words. In both cases, an adjustable number (slack) of non-matched words may be accepted between the searched ones (use the counter on the left to adjust this count). For phrases, the default count is zero (exact match). For proximity it is ten (meaning that two search terms, would be matched if found within a window of twelve words). Examples: a phrase search for quick fox with a slack of 0 will match quick fox but not quick brown fox. With a slack of 1 it will match the latter, but not fox quick. A proximity search for quick fox with the default slack will match the latter, and also a fox is a cunning and quick animal.
Click on the Start Search button in the advanced search dialog, or type Enter in any text field to start the search. The button in the main window always performs a simple search.
Click on the Show query details link at the top of the result page to see the query expansion.
Recoll automatically manages the expansion of search terms to their derivatives (ie: plural/singular, verb inflections). But there are other cases where the exact search term is not known. For example, you may not remember the exact spelling, or only know the beginning of the name.
The term explorer tool (started from the toolbar icon or from the Term explorer entry of the Tools menu) can be used to search the full index terms list. It has three modes of operations:
In this mode of operation, you can enter a search string with shell-like wildcards (*, ?, []). ie: xapi* would display all index terms beginning with xapi. (More about wildcards here).
This mode will accept a regular expression as input. Example: word[0-9]+. The put. Examplhe result list entries is entirely configurable by using the preference dialog to edit an HTML fragment.
You can click on the Query details link at the top of the results page to see the query actually performed, after stem expansion and other processing.
Double-clicking on any word inside the result list or a preview window will insert it into the simple search text.
The result list is divided into pages (the size of which you can change in the preferences). Use the arrow buttons in the toolbar or the links at the bottom of the page to browse the results.
Apart from the preview and edit links, you can display a pop-up menu by right-clicking over a paragraph in the result list. This menu has the following entries:
Preview
Edit
Copy File Name
Copy Url
Save to File
Find similar
Preview Parent document
Open Parent document
The Preview and Edit entries do the same thing as the corresponding links.
The Copy File Name and Copy Url copy the relevant data to the clipboard, for later pasting.
Save to File allows saving the contents of a result document to a chosen file. This entry will only appear if the document does not correspond to an existing file, but is a subdocument inside such a file (ie: an email attachment). It is especially useful to extract attachments with no associated editor.
The Find similar entry will select a number of relevant term from the current document and enter them into the simple search field. You can then start a simple search, with a good chance of finding documents related to the current result.
The Parent document entries will appear for documents which are not actually files but are part of, or attached to, a higher level document. This entry is mainly useful for email attachments and permits viewing the message to which the document is attached. Note that the entry will also appear for an email which is part of an mbox folder file, but that you can't actually visualize the folder (there will be an error dialog if you try). Recoll is unfortunately not yet smart enough to disable the entry in this case. In other cases, the Open option makes sense, for exemple to start a chm viewer on the parent document for a help page.
The preview window opens when you first click a Preview link inside the result list.
Subsequent preview requests for a given search open new tabs in the existing window (except if you hold the Shift key while clicking which will open a new window for side by side viewing).
Starting another search and requesting a preview will create a new preview window. The old one stays open until you close it.
You can close a preview tab by typing ^W (Ctrl + W) in the window. Closing the last tab for a window will also close the window.
Of course you can also close a preview window by using the window manager button in the top of the frame.
You can display successive or previous documents from the result list inside a preview tab by typing Shift+Down or Shift+Up (Down and Up are the arrow keys).
The preview tabs have an internal incremental search function. You initiate the search either by typing a / (slash) inside the text area or by clicking into the Search for: text field and entering the search string. You can then use the Next and Previous buttons to find the next/previous occurrence. You can also type F3 inside the text area to get to the next occurrence.
If you have a search string entered and you use ^Up/^Down to browse the results, the search is initiated for each successive document. If the string is found, the cursor will be positioned at the first occurrence of the search string.
A right-click menu in the text area allows switching between displaying the main text or the contents of fields associated to the document (ie: author, abtract, etc.). This is especially useful in cases where the term match did not occur in the main text but in one of the fields.
You can print the current preview window contents by typing ^P (Ctrl + P) in the window text.
The query language processor is activated on the simple search entry when the search mode selector is set to Query Language.
The language is roughly based on the Xesam user search language specification.
Here follows a sample request that we are going to explain:
author:"john doe" Beatles OR Lennon Live OR Unplugged -potatoes
This would search for all documents with John Doe appearing as a phrase in the author field (exactly what this is would depend on the document type, ie: the From: header, for an email message), and containing either beatles or lennon and either live or unplugged but not potatoes (in any part of the document).
An element is composed of an optional field specification, and a value, separated by a colon. Exemple: Beatles, author:balzac, dc:title:grandet
The colon, if present, means "contains". Xesam defines other relations, which are not supported for now.
All elements in the search entry are normally combined with an implicit AND. It is possible to specify that elements be OR'ed instead, as in Beatles OR Lennon. The OR must be entered literally (capitals), and it has priority over the AND associations: word1 word2 OR word3 means word1 AND (word2 OR word3) not (word1 AND word2) OR word3. Do not enter explicit parenthesis, they are not supported for now.
An element preceded by a - specifies a term that should not appear. Pure negative queries are forbidden.
As usual, words inside quotes define a phrase (the order of words is significant), so that title:"prejudice pride" is not the same as title:prejudice title:pride, and is unlikely to find a result.
Recoll currently manages the following default fields:
title, subject or caption are synonyms which specify data to be searched for in the document title or subject.
author or from for searching the documents originators.
recipient or to for searching the documents recipients.
keyword for searching the document-specified keywords (few documents actually have any).
filename for the document's file name.
ext specifies the file name extension (Ex: ext:html)
The field syntax also supports a few field-like, but special, criteria:
dir for filtering the results on file location (Ex: dir:/home/me/somedir). Please note that this is quite inefficient, that it may produce very slow searches, and that it may be worth in some cases to set up separate databases instead.
mime or format for specifying the mime type. This one is quite special because you can specify several values which will be OR'ed (the normal default for the language is AND). Ex: mime:text/plain mime:text/html. Specifying an explicit boolean operator or negation (-) before a mime specification is not supported and will produce strange results.
type or rclcat for specifying the category (as in text/media/presentation/etc.). The classification of mime types in categories is defined in the Recoll configuration (mimeconf), and can be modified or extended. The default category names are those which permit filtering results in the main GUI screen. Categories are OR'ed like mime types above.
The document filters used while indexing have the possibility to create other fields with arbitrary names, and aliases may be defined in the configuration, so that the exact field search possibilities may be different for you if someone took care of the customisation.
The query language is currently the only way to use the Recoll field search capability.
Words inside phrases and capitalized words are not stem-expanded. Wildcards may be used anywhere inside a term. Specifying a wild-card on the left of a term can produce a very slow search (or even an incorrect one if the expansion is truncated because of excessive size).
You can use the show query link at the top of the result list to check the exact query which was finally executed by Xapian.
Most Xesam phrase modifiers are unsupported, except for l (small ell) to disable stemming, and p to turn a phrase into a NEAR (unordered) search. Exemple: "prejudice pride"p
The advanced search dialog helps you build more complex queries. It can be opened through the Tools menu or through the main toolbar.
The dialog has three parts:
The top part allows constructing a query by combining multiple clauses of different types. Each entry field is configurable for the following modes:
All terms.
Any term.
None of the terms.
Phrase (exact terms in order within an adjustable window).
Proximity (terms in any order within an adjustable window).
Filename search.
Additional entry fields can be created by clicking the Add clause button.
When searching, the non-empty clauses will be combined either with an AND or an OR conjunction, depending on the choice made on the left (All clauses or Any clause).
Entries of all types except "Phrase" and "Near" accept a mix of single words and phrases enclosed in double quotes. Stemming and wildcard expansion will be performed as for simple search.
The next part allows filtering the results by their mime types.
The state of the file type selection can be saved as the default (the file type filter will not be activated at program start-up, but the lists will be in the restored state).
The bottom part allows restricting the search results to a sub-tree of the indexed area. If you need to do this often, you may think of setting up multiple indexes instead, as the performance will be much better.
Phrases and Proximity searches. These two clauses work in similar ways, with the difference that proximity searches do not impose an order on the words. In both cases, an adjustable number (slack) of non-matched words may be accepted between the searched ones (use the counter on the left to adjust this count). For phrases, the default count is zero (exact match). For proximity it is ten (meaning that two search terms, would be matched if found within a window of twelve words). Examples: a phrase search for quick fox with a slack of 0 will match quick fox but not quick brown fox. With a slack of 1 it will match the latter, but not fox quick. A proximity search for quick fox with the default slack will match the latter, and also a fox is a cunning and quick animal.
Click on the Start Search button in the advanced search dialog, or type Enter in any text field to start the search. The button in the main window always performs a simple search.
Click on the Show query details link at the top of the result page to see the query expansion.
Recoll automatically manages the expansion of search terms to their derivatives (ie: plural/singular, verb inflections). But there are other cases where the exact search term is not known. For example, you may not remember the exact spelling, or only know the beginning of the name.
The term explorer tool (started from the toolbar icon or from the Term explorer entry of the Tools menu) can be used to search the full index terms list. It has three modes of operations:
In this mode of operation, you can enter a search string with shell-like wildcards (*, ?, []). ie: xapi* would display all index terms beginning with xapi. (More about wildcards here).
This mode will accept a regular expression as input. Example: word[0-9]+. The put. Examplhe result list entries is entirely configurable by using the preference dialog to edit an HTML fragment.
You can click on the Query details link at the top of the results page to see the query actually performed, after stem expansion and other processing.
Double-clicking on any word inside the result list or a preview window will insert it into the simple search text.
The result list is divided into pages (the size of which you can change in the preferences). Use the arrow buttons in the toolbar or the links at the bottom of the page to browse the results.
Apart from the preview and edit links, you can display a pop-up menu by right-clicking over a paragraph in the result list. This menu has the following entries:
Preview
Edit
Copy File Name
Copy Url
Save to File
Find similar
Preview Parent document
Open Parent document
The Preview and Edit entries do the same thing as the corresponding links.
The Copy File Name and Copy Url copy the relevant data to the clipboard, for later pasting.
Save to File allows saving the contents of a result document to a chosen file. This entry will only appear if the document does not correspond to an existing file, but is a subdocument inside such a file (ie: an email attachment). It is especially useful to extract attachments with no associated editor.
The Find similar entry will select a number of relevant term from the current document and enter them into the simple search field. You can then start a simple search, with a good chance of finding documents related to the current result.
The Parent document entries will appear for documents which are not actually files but are part of, or attached to, a higher level document. This entry is mainly useful for email attachments and permits viewing the message to which the document is attached. Note that the entry will also appear for an email which is part of an mbox folder file, but that you can't actually visualize the folder (there will be an error dialog if you try). Recoll is unfortunately not yet smart enough to disable the entry in this case. In other cases, the Open option makes sense, for exemple to start a chm viewer on the parent document for a help page.
The preview window opens when you first click a Preview link inside the result list.
Subsequent preview requests for a given search open new tabs in the existing window (except if you hold the Shift key while clicking which will open a new window for side by side viewing).
Starting another search and requesting a preview will create a new preview window. The old one stays open until you close it.
You can close a preview tab by typing ^W (Ctrl + W) in the window. Closing the last tab for a window will also close the window.
Of course you can also close a preview window by using the window manager button in the top of the frame.
You can display successive or previous documents from the result list inside a preview tab by typing Shift+Down or Shift+Up (Down and Up are the arrow keys).
The previ