[HN Gopher] Recoll - Full-text search for your desktop
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Recoll - Full-text search for your desktop
Author : nanna
Score : 96 points
Date : 2022-12-01 13:35 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.lesbonscomptes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.lesbonscomptes.com)
| college_physics wrote:
| Invaluable tool. Can handle massive collections of files. For
| power users it feels more appropriate to have a dedicated search
| engine application like recoll rather than embed search in the
| desktop (for a long time I was disabling baloo on KDE desktops as
| it would make the machine unusable while it was indexing).
|
| The recoll UI could be improved and in general the integration
| e.g. with python scipting or other tools could be made easier but
| this is a much appreciated project and it is good to see it keeps
| being developed.
|
| In an ideal universe projects such as this should converge with
| other desktop apps to create truly empowering information tools
| (repatriating the agency that has been relinquished to the
| "cloud")
| sgc wrote:
| The resource use has been the death of any full text desktop
| search I have tried to use. How lightweight is Recoll? I don't
| see much on this on the website, other than I have to use an
| third part CPU limiter if I want to limit CPU use.
| donio wrote:
| Both recoll and Xapian (the index engine) are written in C++.
| The document filters are in Python but they only run once per
| document and tend to be simple and fast (easy to add your own
| too btw). For my use case of 15GB or so PDF files it has been
| lean and fast. It has a pragmatic Unix tool feel. I am only
| using the CLI though so can't speak for the GUI.
|
| Another Xapian-based tool I use is notmuch (email) and that
| one is very snappy too.
| college_physics wrote:
| never had to dig too deep as it is not noticeable (up to a
| certain index size of course https://www.lesbonscomptes.com/r
| ecoll/usermanual/usermanual....). index scheduling can be
| configured (cron) but for my purposes it works ok out of the
| box.
|
| what is quite handy usability-wise: incremental index updates
| (after inserting new files) are fast and can be done on the
| fly while fully using the desktop
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| If you like Recoll you might also like Docfetcher.
| Gys wrote:
| Also for MacOS and I was wondering what benefits Recoll would
| give. From the website:
|
| > It seems that Recoll will sometimes find data that Spotlight
| misses (especially inside pdfs apparently, which is probably more
| to the credit of poppler than recoll itself).
| timeon wrote:
| Spotlight misses inside pdf? Bit strange when it can search
| text inside images.
| MikePlacid wrote:
| I have some additional text search tool for MacOS. It was
| slightly better than Spotlight but I used it so rarely that I
| forgot it's name. The thing that I miss most often in MacOS is
| - "which movie file has that scene that I remember so clearly".
| Isn't it time already to do something like that? _That_ would
| be a noticeable breakthrough indeed. No?
| Gys wrote:
| Interesting. But more something for a website like IMDB I
| guess?
| mahathu wrote:
| I'm not aware if it exists in software form yet, but
| presently your use case can be solved by having a mutually
| advantageous social transaction with a /r/tipofmytongue user
| who is happy to help by recalling the title of the movie (or
| similar) you're thinking of.
| c54 wrote:
| Can this search browser history? I've seen browserparrot[0] for
| this purpose but it's a bit abandoned from what I can tell.
|
| [0]https://www.browserparrot.com/
| fprotthetarball wrote:
| If you are on macOS, HistoryHound is a decent browser search.
| It supports many browsers and even text you may just want to
| search from a directory.
|
| https://www.stclairsoft.com/HistoryHound/
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| Use a browser extension like SingleFile to save pages you want
| to refer back to later to local HTML, then let Recoll index
| them.
|
| If you have something doing this to every page you visit, and
| Recoll can see it, then Recoll can index it.
|
| Regarding automatically saving every page you visit, there's
| multiple tools that do this. One I played with and liked - but
| I can't remember the name - it's 5 numbers and refers to a port
| you can type with localhost to search through all recorded
| pages. That or something like it would work really well with
| Recoll.
| capableweb wrote:
| Supported "format":
| https://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/pages/features.html#do...
|
| If I recall correctly, Firefox keeps your browser history in
| sqlite, seems trivial to add your own "doctype" in order to
| support it, as it's open source
| (https://framagit.org/medoc92/recoll) and written in a modular
| way (check the pdf handler as an example: https://www.lesbonsco
| mptes.com/recoll/usermanual/usermanual....)
| navjack27 wrote:
| Interesting I'm going to have to try this out. By description it
| reminds me of everything
| donio wrote:
| I use this script to make recoll produce pdfgrep-like output so
| that I can use it with Emacs and pdfgrep.el. This gives a nice
| interactive way to wade through thousands of pdf files.
|
| https://github.com/jeremy-compostella/pdfgrep/pull/8#issueco...
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Not bad, I wonder if someone made something similar for ripgrep.
| oezi wrote:
| On Windows I have been using Listary because it integrates into
| all file dialogs and Windows File Explorer. The killer feature is
| that it will navigate in file dialogs to where you are in the
| file explorer. Makes saving files so much easier.
|
| It doesn't index contents just filenames so it is fast.
|
| https://www.listary.com/
| eikaramba wrote:
| former listary user here: pro tip, switch to fluent search. it
| is even more powerful. and for directory switching i found
| "direct folders".
| rasz wrote:
| Everything (https://www.voidtools.com) can also index file
| contents
| jackhab wrote:
| Everything indexes everything EXCEPT contents, unfortunately.
|
| https://www.voidtools.com/faq/#does_everything_search_file_c...
| capableweb wrote:
| Also, "Everything" is only available for Windows and is closed
| source, you can't add support for document types you care
| about.
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