Recoll

Recoll is a desktop full-text search tool. It finds keywords inside documents as well as file names.

• Versions are available for Linux and MS Windows.
• A WEB front-end with preview and download features can replace or supplement the GUI for remote use.
• It can search most document formats. You may need external applications for text extraction.
• It can reach any storage place: files, archive members, email attachments, transparently handling decompression.
• One click will open the document inside a native editor or display an even quicker text preview.
• The software is free, open source, and licensed under the GPL.

For more detail, see the features page on the web site or the online documentation.

Most distributions feature prebuilt packages for Recoll, but if you need them, the instructions for building and installing are here.

About this fork

This is a fork of upstream Recoll focused on a Windows (MSVC) build, with a few additions on top of the original sources:

Windows (MSVC 2022) build

The Windows build uses the qmake .pro files (Qt Creator shadow-build layout), not meson — meson.build has no Windows path.

• Toolchain: Qt 6.8.2 (msvc2022_64) + Visual Studio 2022 Build Tools (MSVC 14.4x). Build each project by loading vcvars64.bat and running qmake -spec win32-msvc then nmake release in a shadow build dir.
• Dependencies (zlib, win-iconv, libxml2, libxslt, Xapian) are built separately into a recolldeps/msvc/ tree that the .pro files reference through the RECOLLDEPS variable.
• libmagic is disabled on Windows (ENABLE_LIBMAGIC is undefined in src/common/autoconfig-win.h): it is impractical to build with MSVC and is only a last-resort MIME detector. MIME detection falls back to the extension map plus the configured file command.
• Text rendering: on Windows the app defaults QT_QPA_PLATFORM to windows:fontengine=freetype (Qt 6's DirectWrite engine renders without antialiasing under RDP / no GPU), and the bundled stylesheet sets an explicit CJK-friendly font family.
• Archive filters: .7z and .rar members are extracted with a bundled 7z.exe (no py7zr / rarfile / unrar dependency).

The result is a portable set of binaries (recoll.exe GUI plus recollindex / recollq / helpers) that can be shipped together with the Qt runtime, the dependency DLLs, and a Share/ tree of filters and data.

Traditional Chinese (zh_TW / 台灣正體) UI

Upstream ships only Simplified Chinese. This fork adds a Taiwan Traditional Chinese translation (src/qtgui/i18n/recoll_zh_TW.ts), selectable from Preferences → GUI configuration → Chinese (Traditional). As with the other languages, the .qm is produced at build time with lrelease.

User-friendly MIME type names in results

The result list and the optional MIME type table column previously showed the raw MIME type (e.g. application/pdf). They now show a localized, human-readable name instead (e.g. PDF document / PDF 文件), driven by a translatable table in src/qtgui/guiutils.cpp with image/, audio/ and video/ family fallbacks and a final fallback to the raw MIME type for unlisted types. The command-line tools (recollq) intentionally keep the raw MIME type.