It is possible to customise some aspects of the search interface by using Query configuration entry in the Preferences menu.
There are two tabs in the dialog, dealing with the interface itself, and with the parameters used for searching and returning results.
User interface parameters:
Number of results in a result page
Result list font: There is quite a lot of information shown in the result list, and you may want to customise the font and/or font size. The rest of the fonts used by Recoll are determined by your generic QT config (try the qtconfig command.
Html help browser: this will let you chose your preferred browser which will be started from the Help menu to read the user manual. You can enter a simple name if the command is in your PATH, or browse for a full pathname.
Show document type icons in result list: icons in the result list can be turned off. They take quite a lot of space and convey relatively little useful information.
Auto-start simple search on whitespace entry: if this is checked, a search will be executed each time you enter a space in the simple search input field. This lets you look at the result list as you enter new terms. This is off by default, you may like it or not...
Search parameters:
Stemming language: stemming obviously depends on the document's language. This listbox will let you chose among the stemming databases which were built during indexing (this is set in the main configuration file), or later added with recollindex -s (See the recollindex manual). Stemming languages which are dynamically added will be deleted at the next indexing pass unless they are also added in the configuration file.
Dynamically build abstracts: this decides if Recoll tries to build document abstracts when displaying the result list. Abstracts are constructed by taking context from the document information, around the search terms. This can slow down result list display significantly for big documents, and you may want to turn it off.
Replace abstracts from documents: this decides if we should synthetize and display an abstract in place of an explicit abstract found within the document itself.
This panel will let you browse for additional databases that you may want to search. Extra databases are designated by their database directory (ie: /home/someothergui/.recoll/xapiandb, /usr/local/recollglobal/xapiandb).
Once entered, the databases will appear in the All extra databases list, and you can chose which ones you want to use at any moment by tranferring them to/from the Active extra databases list.
Your main database (the one the current configuration indexes to), is always implicitely active. If this is not desirable, you can set up your configuration so that it indexes, for example, an empty directory.