A Python plugin for Albert that queries Recoll+Xapian
Coming from Mac OS I really missed the Spotlight feature that would display files containing certain terms. Albert provides matches based on file names but not yet on file content. This plugin aims to do just that using Recoll and Xapian for the indexing and subsequent retrieval of documents.
Recoll and Xapian and the Python API for Recoll is required.
For recent Ubuntu versions you should just be able to do
sudo apt-get install -y recoll python3-recoll
This installs the binaries and the Python packages. Note that there is no way of pip install the Python packages as far as I know, which makes it a bit tricky to work within a virtualenv like you usually would.
Make sure you create an index of the files and directories you deem relevant.
Follow the indexing instructions
in the Recoll User manual, though I can offer one recommendation so you don't get spammed with too many non-relevant
results and improve indexing performance / time, and that is by making sure the hidden folders and files are not indexed.
You can do that from the GUI by going to Preferences > Index Configuration > Local Parameters and adding .* or simply
by including it in the .recoll/recoll.conf. Here is a oneliner for it :
echo "skippedNames+ = .*" >> ~/.recoll/recoll.conf
Then go ahead an run the indexing from the GUI by clicking File > Create Index or from commandline by issuing something like
recollindex -r ~ if you would like to index everything recursively from your home folder.
If the indexing worked properly you should be able to issue a query either from the GUI search bar or
from command line: recoll -t <query>. It's worth trying this on a known file's contents and observing the results
Note: I had an issue with some of the filters using cgi.escape in Python 3.8 as escape was moved to the html module. So for now you should use Python 3.7 or lower for full compatibility.
This plugin was developed and tested with Recoll 1.26.3 + Xapian 1.4.14 on Ubuntu 20.04
Assuming your Recoll is working properly, we can go ahead and install the Python plugin
Run the install script install.sh to copy the plugin folder to Albert. Then make sure the plug-in is enabled in Albert's
settings under Python.
The string you enter in Albert is passed onto Recoll exactly as you enter it, meaning you can also use the more
advanced query language of Recoll for example by using logical operators (OR, AND and the minus sign - for negation
or exclusion of a specific term). See Recoll user manual on how these work.
By default the plugin is triggerless, meaning it will always try to match whatever is in the search bar for recoll hits.
If you prefer to have a trigger you can uncomment the __trigger__ = "rc " line so that it triggers only when you type
rc first followed by whatever query should be sent to Recoll.
Note also the boolean flag remove_duplicates which will remove possible duplicate hits inside of archives that share
the same URL. By default this is set to True.
Currently there are five actions associated to this plugin. The actions are identical to the default FileExtension
of Albert (the one that matches queries with filenames)
- Open with default application (default action): Simply open the file with URLAction. This should open whatever application is registered to handle this type of file
- Reveal in file browser: Open the directory of the file. This currently only works on Mac and Linux
- Open terminal at this path: Open a new terminal window with its current working directory set to the path
- Copy path to clipboard: Copy the full absolute path to the file as returned by Recoll to the clipboard
- Copy file to clipboard: Copy the file's contents to the clipboard
- Show a little context for the match.
- Icons for the files it found
- Copy file contents should be copied lazily (this might require a change in Albert's clipaction)