3.7. Search tips, shortcuts

Disabling stem expansion. Entering a capitalized word in any search field will prevent stem expansion (no search for gardening if you enter Garden instead of garden). This is the only case where character case should make a difference for a Recoll search.

Phrases. A phrase can be looked for by enclosing it in double quotes. Example: "user manual" will look only for occurrences of user immediately followed by manual. You can use the This exact phrase field of the advanced search dialog to the same effect.

Term completion. Typing ^TAB (Control+Tab) in the simple search entry field while entering a word will either complete the current word if its beginning matches a unique term in the index, or open a window to propose a list of completions

Picking up new terms for search from displayed documents. Double-clicking on a word in the result list or in a preview window will copy it to the simple search entry field.

Finding related documents. Selecting the More like this entry in the result list paragraph right-click menu will select a set of "interesting" terms from the current result, and insert them into the simple search entry field. You can then possibly edit the list and start a search to find documents which may be apparented to the current result.

Query explanation. You can get an exact description of what the query looked for, including stem expansion, and boolean operators used, by clicking on the result list header.

File names. File names are added as terms during indexing, and you can specify them as ordinary terms in normal search fields (Recoll used to index all directories in the file path as terms. This has been abandonned as it did not seem really useful). Alternatively, you can use specific file name search which will only look for file names and can use wildcard expansion.

Quitting. Entering ^Q almost anywhere will close the application.

Closing previews. Entering ^W in a preview tab will close it (and, for the last tab, close the preview window).