(no subject)

[brin_bellway]

I learned about Recoll today while looking for a way to search ~50 chat-log ODT documents for a particular exchange, and oh my god it's amazing.

It totally did handle that situation, but it also handles *so* many other file formats. EPUB, HTML, Thunderbird, *things inside zipped folders* (7-zip too, if you install the right plugin!), just to name a few. I tried a search for "backpack" and got hits from chat logs, fanfics, ebooks, blogs, wikis, emails...

And there's search syntax, to let you exclude stuff with certain words or restrict it to a particular directory and all that.

I have acquired my own private search engine! That is a thing, that exists, right now, that you can just download off Synaptic like it's no big deal and not something beyond Vannevar Bush's wildest dreams!

Comments

[lunartulip]

Inconveniently, the Windows version costs money, so I can't do the thing I'd normally do here of downloading it, seeing how useful it is in day-to-day life, and then either continuing with it or uninstalling it depending on the answer.

(I can run it on my Linux dual-boot to figure out, on a pure UI-and-technical-capabilities level, whether it's likely to work for me; but being usable at all is a much lower bar to meet than being sufficiently useful during normal day-to-day activities to warrant spending money on. I'm not sure how to figure out that second thing, given the relative infrequency with which I do anything on my Linux dual-boot.)

[brin_bellway]

Today I was reading the Wikipedia entry on Recoll and came across https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines#Desktop_search_engines. Maybe one of those would be helpful to you?

[lunartulip]

Ooh, this is a cool list, thanks! I did end up buying Recoll in the time since making my upthread comment—the cost was a lot less bothersome once I acquired my job—but these still seem worth looking into as backups in case I run into issues with Recoll in the future.

(From a first pass, it seems like DocFetcher is the other one most well-optimized for my use case; but plausibly the list will have changed by the time it becomes relevant to me down the line.)