Recoll-Lens: Full Text Search Unity Lens For Ubuntu 11.10 And 12.04 [Updated]

Recoll is a full text search desktop tool which indexes the contents of many file formats including OpenOffice, MS Office, PostScript, MP3 and other audio files, JPEG and more. Besides regular searches, Recoll also lets you perform some advanced operations like searching for the author, file size, file format as well as operators like "AND" or "OR".

Unity Recoll Lens lets you use Recoll from Dash, without having to open any additional GUI. The lens comes with a few filters like Text, Spreadsheet, Presentation, Media or Message, but for more advanced searches, you'll have to manually enter the Recoll search query. Examples:

• author:"john doe"
• metallica OR megadeth
• /2007 (all documents from 2007 or older)
• dir:/path/to/dir (filters content from /path/to/dir directory)

You can learn more about using Recoll, HERE.

Install Unity Recoll Lens

Unity Recoll Lens is available in the Recoll backports PPA for Ubuntu 12.04 11.10 and 11.04. To add the PPA and install Unity Recoll Lens, use the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:recoll-backports/recoll-1.15-on
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install recoll-lens recoll

Update: the lens now works on Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin too.

Once installed, you'll have to start the Recoll GUI (just search for Recoll in Dash) and let it index your files. Once it finishes, log out, then log back in and you should see a new Recoll search lens. The Recoll search results don't show up just on the Recoll lens but also on the home Dash, when performing a global search.

If you're not using Unity, you can use the Recoll Qt user interface - to install the latest version use the same PPA as above, but don't install "recoll-lens" (only install "recoll"). Using the PPA, you'll install the latest Recoll 1.17 released a couple of days ago which brings a new set of dialogs to set up the indexing schedule, file size filtering, non-absolute paths for "dir:" and more.

From the Recoll preferences you can configure which directories Recoll should index, which files should be ignored, set up the Recoll index scheduling (also see THIS comment about indexing) and more.

Thanks to Halil-Cem Gürsoy for the tip!

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