Release notes for Recoll 1.17.x

Caveats

Installing over an older version: 1.17 is fully compatible with 1.16 indexes, and mostly compatible with 1.15 ones, except for a few differences for weird terms containing punctuation signs. Perform a full index pass if installing over an older version. The simplest way to do this is to quit all recoll programs and just delete the index directory (rm -rf ~/.recoll/xapiandb), then start recoll or recollindex. recollindex -z will do the same in most cases.

Also, using the anchored search feature on an 1.15 index requires a full reindex.

Changes

Recoll 1.17 is an incremental improvements release over 1.16, no major function was introduced or modified.

• Recoll now supports filtering on file sizes. This is accessible from the advanced search panel, or from the query langage (ie: "size>10k size<1m"). For documents stored inside archives, the file size stored in the index is now the actual one not the archive's as was previously the case.
• Query language: Tilde is now expanded inside a "dir:" clause.
• Query language: the "dir:" directive now accepts non-absolute paths. For example dir:dir1/dir2 will accept any file the ancestors of which include "dir1/dir2".
• GUI: When a search fails to retrieve results, the spelling suggestions are now presented as links inside the result list area. Clicking a link will replace the appropriate word inside the search entry.
• GUI: Thumbnails will be displayed in the result list if an appropriate one is found in the standard freedesktop thumbnails directory (ie: created by gimp or some file manager). Recoll will not create thumbnails (this would slow result display too much).
• GUI: It is now possible to control the date format used to display result (go to query preferences).
• GUI: It is now possible to Copy/Paste from the term explorer result list.
• GUI: it is now possible to use a Qt style sheet to modify many aspects of Recoll appearance. A style sheet file can be selected from the GUI query configuration dialog. A sample skeleton style sheet is to be found in the share/recoll/examples directory.
• GUI: Added menu entry to show all the mime types actually indexed.
• GUI: the result list is now based on the WebKit widget instead of QTextBrowser. This means better html/css support, and even Javascript ... You can force the use the old QTextBrowser instead by using configure --disable-webkit.
• GUI: Use Shift+PageUp instead of Shift+Home to rewind the result list to the first page. Shift+Home is useful in the search entry.
• The GUI now has a set of dialogs to set up the indexing schedule, either as automatic real time indexing started with the user session or as discrete cron entries. This will take care of the details of autostart files or crontab editing.
• The GUI indexing thread has been removed. All indexing is now performed by a separate recollindex process. This has multiple advantages, the thread was just a very bad idea. Among others, exiting the GUI has no influence on an ongoing indexing.
• The GUI indexing configuration now only shows the directories customized by the user not those which come from the standard configuration (ie: ~/.thunderbird). Showing the standard directories was more often confusing than useful.
• The GUI now has a menu entry to force a full reindex.
• GUI: the default reslist paragraph now displays the ipath: this is very useful for archive members and not too disturbing for other kinds.
• GUI: it is now possible to cancel a query that takes too long. Because of limitations in Xapian, this forces a program exit, but it's probably better than staring at a hung Recoll.
• What used to be the document category filters (media/text/etc.) are now defined as query language fragments inside mimeconf. This means that you can redefine them freely (see the comments for the [guifilters] section in the default mimeconf).
• Command line query: can now select a result slice (first result rank and count of results).
• Indexer: handle the html5 charset meta tag.
• Real time indexer: restart automatically when the configuration changes.
• Indexer: Added okular notes and gnumeric filters.
• Fixed bugs:
  • Indexing configuration: deleting one customized directory would sometimes delete the whole list (depending on Qt version I think).
  • Indexing configuration: adding a customized directory would not make it the active/current one (so that another click was needed to choose it before making modifications).
  • The GUI preview now performs an up to date check before displaying data from a subdocument, and proposes to reindex the container if it changed. This is mostly useful for mailbox containers, where preview would sometimes display the wrong message (if the folder had been compacted).
  • Fix a bug in html charset detection. The wrong charset was sometimes used for GUI preview.
  • The chm filter can now process files lacking a Topics node.
  • The default slack for proximity searches from the query language (ie: "word1 word2"p) had become 0. It was restored to 10.