consult-recoll
- Description
- Recoll queries using consult
- Latest
- consult-recoll-0.8.1.tar (.sig), 2024-Mar-31, 230 KiB
- Maintainer
- Jose A Ortega Ruiz <jao@gnu.org>
- Atom feed
- consult-recoll.xml
- Website
- https://codeberg.org/jao/consult-recoll
- Browse ELPA's repository
- CGit or Gitweb
- Badge
To install this package from Emacs, use package-install or list-packages.
Full description
1. About
Recoll is a local search engine that knows how to index a wide variety of file formats, including PDFs, org and other text files and emails. It also offers a sophisticated query language, and, for some document kinds, snippets in the the found documents actually matching the query at hand.
This package provides an emacs interface to perform recoll queries, and display its results, via consult. It is also recommened that you use a a package for vertical display of completions that works well with consult, such as vertico.
This package is part of GNU ELPA, so for recent Emacs versions you can install
it directly via M-x package-install RET consult-recoll RET.
1.1. Tip: using consult-recoll with helm
If you use helm-mode, you'll need to disable helm's completing read for
consult-recoll, with something like:
(with-eval-after-load "helm"
(with-eval-after-load "recoll"
(add-to-list 'helm-completing-read-handlers-alist
(cons #'consult-recoll nil))))
2. Searching
The entry point of consult-recoll is the interactive command
consult-recoll. Just invoke it (e.g., via M-x consult-recoll) to perform
any query and get its results dynamically displayed in the minibuffer,
with "live" updates as the query changes. Selecting any of the candidate
results will open the associated file, using the functions in
consult-recoll-open-fns (see Opening search results below).
By default, your input will be interpreted as a recoll query, in the
recoll query language (so you can issue queries like "author:jao@foo.io"
or "dir:/home/jao/docs mime:application/pdf where is wally", and so on).
You can fine tune how queries are issued by customizing
consult-recoll-search-flags.
2.1. Tip: Two-level filtering
consult-recoll builds on the asychronous logic inside consult.el,
so you can use consult's handy two-level filtering, which allows
searching over the results of a query. For example, if you start
typing
#goedel's theorem
see a bunch of results, and want to narrow them to those lines
matching, say, "hofstadter", you can type # (which stops further
recoll queries) followed by the term you're interested in:
#goedel's theorem#hofstadter
at which point only matches containing "hofstadter" will be offered.
3. Displaying results
For each matching result, consult-recoll retrieves its title, full file
name and mime type, and shows, by default, a line with the first two in the
minibuffer, using the customizable faces consult-recoll-title-face and
consult-recoll-url-face. You can provide your own formatting function
(perhaps stripping common prefixes of the file name, or displaying also the
MIME) as the value of the customizable variable
consult-recoll-format-candidate.
By default, consult-recoll uses consult's live previews to show, for each
selected candidate hit, a buffer with further information, including
snippets of the file (when provided by recoll). The title, path and mime
type of the document are also shown in previews.
See Opening search results below for ways of customizing how Emacs will open selected results.
3.1. Example: formatting results list
As mentioned, one can use consult-recoll-format-candidate to customize how
search results are shown in the minibufer. For instance, i like to
shorten paths removing common prefixes and to show MIME types, so i use
a formatter similar to this one:
(defun jao-recoll-format (title url mime-type)
;; remove from url the common prefixes /home/jao/{org/doc,doc,...}
(let* ((u (replace-regexp-in-string "/home/jao/" "" url))
(u (replace-regexp-in-string
"\\(doc\\|org/doc\\|.emacs.d/gnus/Mail\\|var/mail\\)/" "" u)))
(format "%s (%s, %s)"
(propertize title 'face 'consult-recoll-title-face)
(propertize u 'face 'consult-recoll-url-face)
(propertize mime-type 'face 'consult-recoll-mime-face))))
(setq consult-recoll-format-candidate #'jao-recoll-format)
3.2. Integration with embark-collect
If you use embark, you can use embark-collect to export the list of search
results in the minibuffer to an Embark collect buffer. To allow opening
buffer in that buffer as if they had been selected in the minibuffer,
enable integration with embark adding this call to your init file:
(consult-recoll-embark-setup)
3.3. Tip: displaying snippets in results list
Instead of relying on a separate preview buffer to display snippets, you
can set consult-recoll-inline-snippets to t to show them in the minibuffer,
as individual candidates.
3.4. Tip: disabling mime type groups
By default, results are listed grouped by their mime type. You can
disable grouping by setting the customizable variable
consult-recoll-group-by-mime to nil.
4. Opening search results
When a search result candidate is selected, its MIME type is used to look
up a function to open its associated file in the customizable variable
consult-recoll-open-fns. If no entry is found, consult-recoll uses the
value of consult-open-fn as a default. If the latter is not set,
eww-open-file is used for HTML files and find-file for the rest, moving to
the result's page number if the major mode of the opened file is either
doc-view-mode or pdf-view-mode.
If consult-recoll-inline-snippets is set, the functions above take two
arguments: the URL of the file to open and, if present, the snippet page
number (or nil if it is not available, e.g., because the selected candidate
is the one showing the document data).
If the selected candidate is a snippet corresponding to a text MIME and the
page number of the snippet is 0 (as is often the case, since text files are
normally not paginated), consult-recoll will perform a search for the
snippet text after opening the file.
See also Integration with embark-collect for an alternative way of listing and opening search results using embark.
4.1. Example: opening PDFs with external viewer
For instance, if you want to use zathura to open PDF documents, you could
define an elisp helper like:
(defun open-with-zathura (file &optional page) (shell-command (format "zathura %s -P %s" file (or page 1))))
and then add it to consult-recoll-open-fns:
(add-to-list 'consult-recoll-open-fns '("application/pdf" . open-with-zathura))
4.2. Example: Opening emails with notmuch
If you use notmuch and include your maildirs in recoll's indexed
directories, a simple way to open a candidate result given its file name is
to find out the message's ID and use notmuch.el's function notmuch-show to
open it:
(defun open-with-notmuch (file &optional _page)
(with-temp-buffer
(insert-file-contents-literally file)
(goto-char (point-min))
(and (re-search-forward "^Message-ID: <\\([^>]+\\)>$" nil t)
(notmuch-show (concat "id:" (match-string 1))))))
(add-to-list 'consult-recoll-open-fns '("message/rfc822" . open-with-notmuch))
5. Thanks
Thanks to
- Nicholas P. Rougier for useful discussions and suggestions, including actual fixes.
- Stefan Monnier for setting up the GNU ELPA package.
- Johan Widén for tips on using consult-recoll with helm.
Old versions
| consult-recoll-0.8.tar.lz | 2022-Oct-14 | 183 KiB |
| consult-recoll-0.7.tar.lz | 2022-Aug-20 | 182 KiB |
| consult-recoll-0.6.2.tar.lz | 2022-Aug-08 | 180 KiB |