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Recoll

Version: 1.36.1 Web: www. lesbonscomptes.com/recoll

The find command is pretty handy for finding files embedded in your filesystem. Even if you don’t want to get down to the CLI, most modern file managers have a find function that’s dexterous enough to get the job done. But neither of these offer the functionality you get with Recoll, which can dig up documents based on their content, even inside email attachments and compressed archives.

Recoll only offers source packages, and installing them takes some doing. Luckily, Recoll is available in the official repositories of most desktop distros. Fedora users, for instance, can install it with sudo dnf install recoll .

There’s also a PPA for Ubuntu users, which also works on Mint. Add the repo with sudo add-aptrepository ppa:recoll-backports/recoll-1.15-on , then use sudo apt-get update to refresh your repos, before you install Recoll with sudo apt install recoll .

When launched for the first time, Recoll asks you to create an index. You can configure the index creation process by adjusting the directories you want included or excluded from the process. However, the app itself recommends to go with its sensible default settings, at least for the initial build.

Depending on the size of the filesystem, creating the index could take a while. Recoll can index many document types, such as plain text, HTML, OpenDocument, emails and a few others on its own. For other types, you need to install external helper apps. After building the index, Recoll displays a list of missing helpers, which can also be found by going to Tools > Missing Helpers.

To find a file, enter the search term in the text box at the top, and hit Search. has several search modes. Query language should work for most cases, but you can also use the app to exclusively look for filenames, not contents. You can