This document introduces full text search notions and describes the installation and use of the Recoll application. It is updated for Recoll 1.38.

Recoll was for a long time dedicated to Unix-like systems. It was only lately (2015) ported to MS-Windows. Many references in this manual, especially file locations, are specific to Unix, and not valid on Windows, where some described features are also not available. The manual will be progressively updated. Until this happens, on Windows, most references to shared files can be translated by looking under the Recoll installation directory (Typically C:/Program Files (x86)/Recoll). Especially, anything referenced inside /usr/share in this document will be found in the Share subdirectory of the installation). The user configuration is stored by default under AppData/Local/Recoll inside the user directory, along with the index itself.