After starting a search, a list of results will instantly be displayed in the main 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 sort the result by ascending or descending date by using the vertical arrows in the toolbar.
Clicking 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
start an external viewer for the document. By default, Recoll lets
the desktop choose the appropriate application for most document
types. See
further
for customizing the applications.
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.
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.
By default Recoll lets the desktop choose what application should be used to open a given document, with exceptions.
The details of this behaviour can be customized with the
→ → → dialog or by editing
the
mimeview configuration file.
When Use desktop preferences, at the top of the dialog, is checked, the desktop default is generally used, but there is a small default list of exceptions, for MIME types where the Recoll choice should override the desktop one. These are applications which are well integrated with Recoll, for example, on Linux, evince for viewing PDF and Postscript files because of its support for opening the document at a specific page and passing a search string as an argument. You can add or remove document types to the exceptions by using the dialog.
If you prefer to completely customize the choice of applications, you can uncheck Use desktop preferences, in which case the Recoll predefined applications will be used, and can be changed for each document type. This is probably not the most convenient approach in most cases.
In all cases, the applications choice dialog accepts
multiple selections of MIME types in the top section, and lets
you define how they are processed in the bottom one. In most
cases, you will be using %f as a place
holder to be replaced by the file name in the application
command line.
You may also change the choice of applications by editing
the
mimeview
configuration file if you find this more convenient.
Under Unix-like systems, each result list entry also has a right-click menu with an Open With entry. This lets you choose an application from the list of those which registered with the desktop for the document MIME type, on a case by case basis.
