# Recoll user manual
Indexing

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## Index configuration

Variables set inside the Recoll configuration files control which areas of the file system are indexed, and how files are processed. These variables can be set either by editing the text files or by using the dialogs in the recoll GUI.

The first time you start recoll, you will be asked whether or not you would like it to build the index. If you want to adjust the configuration before indexing, just click Cancel at this point, which will get you into the configuration interface. If you exit at this point, `recoll` will have created a `~/.recoll` directory containing empty configuration files, which you can edit by hand.

The configuration is documented inside the installation chapter of this document, or in the recoll.conf(5) man page, but the most current information will most likely be the comments inside the sample file. The most immediately useful variable you may interested in is probably `topdirs`, which determines what subtrees get indexed.

The applications needed to index file types other than text, HTML or email (ie: pdf, postscript, ms-word...) are described in the external packages section.

As of Recoll 1.18 there are two incompatible types of Recoll indexes, depending on the treatment of character case and diacritics. The next section describes the two types in more detail.

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