Installing over an older version and other notes

Note
 Ubuntu commands installed as snap packages can’t create arbitrary files under /tmp. This is for example the case by default for pdftk which is used by Recoll to extract PDF attachments. For best results, set TMPDIR to a location which belongs to you (e.g. inside your home, with something like export TMPDIR=~/tmp in your shell startup script). Recoll could conceivably work around the problem all by itself, but I find it in bad taste to create temporary files in an arbitrary location inside your home.

1.20 to 1.37 indexes are fully backward compatible. No need to reindex when upgrading.

Always reset the index if you do not know by which version it was created (e.g.: you’re not sure it’s at least 1.18). The best method is to quit all Recoll programs and delete the index directory (rm -rf ~/.recoll/xapiandb), then start recoll or recollindex.

recollindex -z will do the same in most, but not all, cases. It’s better to use the rm method, which will also ensure that no debris from older releases remain (e.g.: old stemming files which are not used any more).

On Windows, the index is located by default in C:/Users/[yourlogin]/AppData/Local/Recoll/xapiandb

Case/diacritics sensitivity is off by default. It can be turned on only by editing recoll.conf ( see the manual). If you do so, you must then reset the index.

Changes in Recoll 1.37.0

  • Display previews using the main HTML engine (webkit or webengine) instead of a QTextBrowser. This improves highlighting search terms while walking them with the Prev/Next buttons.

  • New integration with the Jieba chinese text segmenter. This can optionally replace the n-gram token generator used by default for CJK text, and produces a smaller index and much better terms. See recoll-chinese.html for more details.

  • New handler for the .zip.html files produced by the SingleFileZ browser extension.

  • Powerpoint: also index the slide notes.

  • GUI: Add a preference for setting the format of the dates displayed in the side filter.

  • Add configuration option to not store term positions, yielding a much smaller index, but forbidding phrase/proximity searches.

Minor releases at a glance

  • 1.37.5

    • Fix a weird issue where the GUI refuses to exit. Only happens when the GUI is built with Qt5 (not with Qt6), and only with certain desktops and session types (e.g. KDE Plasma 6 6.0.2 on OpenSUSE, with X11 but not with Wayland). Not too sure of the exact conditions, did not do very wide testing. Anyway the fix is to call _exit()…​

  • 1.37.4

    • Check that Joplin is there before trying to index it: suppresses annoying message…​

  • 1.37.2

    • Modify the archive container handlers (7z,rar,tar,zip) to all use the same code for skipping names (skippednames, onlynames,etc.).

    • GUI: Fix image preview (would crash with webkit, not display big images with webengine).

    • GUI: paragraph format: fix user-added links like E%N not working any more because of internally using absolute URLs.

    • GUI: Work around apparent Qt 5 bug which would prevent Cinnamon desktop shutdown by avoiding calling qApp→exit() (fixed in qt6).

    • Add the Joplin variables to the default configuration.

    • Enable the Joplin indexer by default on Linux.

    • Fix the rclmon.sh script detection of a running recollindex.

    • Windows: port the Joplin indexer and enable it by default.

    • Windows: fix problem in process management which would make Jieba-based Chinese text indexing very slow (it is still slow though).