Emacs interface to Recoll other than Helm?

Emacs interface to Recoll other than Helm?

[Angel de Vicente]

Hi,

I've started using Recoll (https://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/) to
index my files. It works quite nicely, so now the next obvious step is
to try to run it from inside Emacs (I can do it simply from a terminal,
but ideally I would like to get the output formatted in a way similar to
what you get when doing multi-occur: a buffer with all the search
matches and with clickable files that will open the matched file).

I've found that there is a Helm interface to it
(https://github.com/emacs-helm/helm-recoll), but right now I'm using Ivy
(http://oremacs.com/swiper/) and if possible I would like to avoid
installing Helm just for the integration with Recoll (plus, I'm not sure
if it will clash somehow with the installed Ivy?).

Any pointers/suggestions/ideas welcome.

Many thanks,
-- 
Ángel de Vicente
http://angel-de-vicente.blogspot.com/

Re: Emacs interface to Recoll other than Helm?

[Kaushal Modi]

On Tue, Nov 7, 2017 at 10:34 AM Angel de Vicente <angelv@iac.es> wrote:

> but right now I'm using Ivy
> (http://oremacs.com/swiper/) and if possible I would like to avoid
> installing Helm just for the integration with Recoll (plus, I'm not sure
> if it will clash somehow with the installed Ivy?).
>

You will find Ivy-backend based plugins in the counsel library. About your
question specific to Ivy+Recoll, it's already out there by the Ivy author
himself: https://oremacs.com/2015/07/27/counsel-recoll/
-- 

Kaushal Modi

Re: Emacs interface to Recoll other than Helm?

[Angel de Vicente]

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Hi,

Kaushal Modi <kaushal.modi@gmail.com> writes:
> On Tue, Nov 7, 2017 at 10:34 AM Angel de Vicente <angelv@iac.es> wrote:
>
>> but right now I'm using Ivy
>> (http://oremacs.com/swiper/) and if possible I would like to avoid
>> installing Helm just for the integration with Recoll (plus, I'm not sure
>> if it will clash somehow with the installed Ivy?).
>>
>
> You will find Ivy-backend based plugins in the counsel library. About your
> question specific to Ivy+Recoll, it's already out there by the Ivy author
> himself: https://oremacs.com/2015/07/27/counsel-recoll/

Funny, I had seen that webpage already and I tried to use the function
in there, but it was giving an error (Error 127, whatever that is), but
then I searched in the counsel.el file in my current version, and the
function counsel-recoll is already defined there! Good, so with a fresh
Emacs (I was overriding the counsel-recoll function) it works, but is
not very convenient for my needs. counsel-recoll will give a dynamic
list of files that match your search, and then you have to open the file
and perform a search (with swiper, for example) to see if that was the
stuff you were looking for (see the attached file counsel-recoll.png).

But for this sort of thing, I think that it is nicer to have a buffer
with the files where matches are found and with some context given. This
is, for example, the type of output I get when doing a multi-occur find
with Projectile (see attached file counsel-recoll-mo.png), and if
possible I would like to try and get something like that, which I think
it will more useful.

Thanks,



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-- 
Ángel de Vicente
http://angel-de-vicente.blogspot.com/

Re: Emacs interface to Recoll other than Helm?

[Angel de Vicente]

Sorry for the double post. I thought the post with the attached images
had been rejected so I post it again with the images as links to
some URL in the Internet. The rest of the message is basically
the same.



Angel de Vicente <angelv@iac.es> writes:

> Hi,
>
> Kaushal Modi <kaushal.modi@gmail.com> writes:
>> On Tue, Nov 7, 2017 at 10:34 AM Angel de Vicente <angelv@iac.es> wrote:
>>
>>> but right now I'm using Ivy
>>> (http://oremacs.com/swiper/) and if possible I would like to avoid
>>> installing Helm just for the integration with Recoll (plus, I'm not sure
>>> if it will clash somehow with the installed Ivy?).
>>>
>>
>> You will find Ivy-backend based plugins in the counsel library. About your
>> question specific to Ivy+Recoll, it's already out there by the Ivy author
>> himself: https://oremacs.com/2015/07/27/counsel-recoll/
>
> Funny, I had seen that webpage already and I tried to use the function
> in there, but it was giving an error (Error 127, whatever that is), but
> then I searched in the counsel.el file in my current version, and the
> function counsel-recoll is already defined there! Good, so with a fresh
> Emacs (I was overriding the counsel-recoll function) it works, but is
> not very convenient for my needs. counsel-recoll will give a dynamic
> list of files that match your search, and then you have to open the file
> and perform a search (with swiper, for example) to see if that was the
> stuff you were looking for (see the attached file counsel-recoll.png).
>
> But for this sort of thing, I think that it is nicer to have a buffer
> with the files where matches are found and with some context given. This
> is, for example, the type of output I get when doing a multi-occur find
> with Projectile (see attached file counsel-recoll-mo.png), and if
> possible I would like to try and get something like that, which I think
> it will more useful.
>
> Thanks,

-- 
Ángel de Vicente
http://angel-de-vicente.blogspot.com/

Re: Emacs interface to Recoll other than Helm?

[Bob Proulx]

Angel de Vicente wrote:
> Sorry for the double post. I thought the post with the attached images
> had been rejected so I post it again with the images as links to
> some URL in the Internet. The rest of the message is basically
> the same.

Thank you for the second message with the links.  For many people
(me!) it is much easier to deal with that than inline images.

As to the original large message with the inline images...  Not to
cause stress but to communicate the problems.  Those large messages
are always very painful for the lists.gnu.org mailing list server to
process when sending to a large mailing list.  This is a small list as
there are only 1410 subscribed members.  (And that does not count the
people reading from the associated newsgroup through the mail2news
gateway.)  Other lists are truly huge with many more members.  When
sending inline images to a large mailing list the total bandwidth is a
huge multiplier.  Often things are very delayed due to those messages.
An 800K message expands to 1.1T of consumed bandwidth to the entire
list for just that one single message.  Often the mailing list server
will be running far behind trying to push bandwidth through the
network.  Which means we have been forced to start capping the size of
messages on many mailing lists.  Also for anyone using their mobile
cell data plan those large messages eat up the data limit to the data
cap very quickly.

Large messages will either be automatically rejected or manually
rejected or manually approved.  One of the list moderators must have
decided to send that one on to the list.  If I had been at the
keyboard reviewing that held message I would have rejected it.  You
would have gotten a rejection notice with an explanation and hints as
to what could be done.  Because of the human factor the actions taken
are not always exactly the same.

Just giving a view into the behind the scenes operations... :-)

Bob

Re: Emacs interface to Recoll other than Helm?

[Angel de Vicente]

Hi,

Bob Proulx <bob@proulx.com> writes:
> Angel de Vicente wrote:
>> Sorry for the double post. I thought the post with the attached images
>> had been rejected so I post it again with the images as links to
>> some URL in the Internet. The rest of the message is basically
>> the same.
>
> Thank you for the second message with the links.  For many people
> (me!) it is much easier to deal with that than inline images.

Note taken. Sorry about that, I don't often send messages to mailing
lists and I've been spoiled by e-mail where we often use it as a file
transfer mechanism :-)
-- 
Ángel de Vicente
http://angel-de-vicente.blogspot.com/

Re: Emacs interface to Recoll other than Helm?

[Angel de Vicente]

Hi,

Kaushal Modi <kaushal.modi@gmail.com> writes:
>> but right now I'm using Ivy
>> (http://oremacs.com/swiper/) and if possible I would like to avoid
>> installing Helm just for the integration with Recoll (plus, I'm not sure
>> if it will clash somehow with the installed Ivy?).
>>
>
> You will find Ivy-backend based plugins in the counsel library. About your
> question specific to Ivy+Recoll, it's already out there by the Ivy author
> himself: https://oremacs.com/2015/07/27/counsel-recoll/

thanks for the pointer. Actually I had tried to used the code in that
page but it was giving me "Error 127", but then I realized I already
have that version defined in counsel.el in my distribution of
ivy/swiper. Now I manage to get it working, but I don't like the result
too much since I get a dynamic list of files that match my query, but
without any context, and then I have to open one by one and do a search
inside the file. It looks like:
http://picpaste.com/counsel-recoll-wDwS45L8.png

What I would like is something more like what you get in the Recoll GUI
(or, for example, when you do a multi-occur search), where you get a
buffer with the files matching, together with some context and an easy
way to open a particular file at the point where the match was
found. Something like:
http://picpaste.com/counsel-recoll-mo-uQUXHGey.png

Any ideas?

Many thanks,
-- 
Ángel de Vicente
http://angel-de-vicente.blogspot.com/

Re: Emacs interface to Recoll other than Helm?

[Angel de Vicente]

Hi,

Angel de Vicente <angelv@iac.es> writes:
> What I would like is something more like what you get in the Recoll GUI
> (or, for example, when you do a multi-occur search), where you get a
> buffer with the files matching, together with some context and an easy
> way to open a particular file at the point where the match was
> found. Something like:
> http://picpaste.com/counsel-recoll-mo-uQUXHGey.png

OK, so I rolled up my sleeves and made a hack that works just fine
(though for the moment it is very crude and most options are
hard-coded).

In case somebody else wants to try, I just defined the following
function in my .emacs  (I have ivy/swiper/counsel, ag and recoll
installed): 

,----
| (defun ag-recoll (string directory)
|   "Search using ag based on the findings of recoll. Search will be done in a given DIRECTORY, 
|    and the STRING will be interpreted as concatenated by ANDs for recoll and with ORs for ag.
| 
|    The idea is that when I search, for example, for 'openacc mpi', recoll will give me all the
|    files that have those two words somewhere in the file, and ag will find lines that match
|    any of the terms.
| 
|    For the moment this is very crude, and most options to recoll and ag are hard-coded in the
|    ag-recoll.sh script, most notably that ag will look for a maximum of 10 matches in each file
|    to avoid huge lists with common searches."
| 
|   (interactive (list (ag/read-from-minibuffer "Search string")
| 		     (read-directory-name "Directory: ")))
|   (setq command-string (format "%s %s %s" "/home/angelv/localhacks/ag-recoll.sh" directory string))
|   (setq regexp nil)
|   (compilation-start
|    command-string
|    #'ag-mode
|    `(lambda (mode-name) ,(ag/buffer-name string directory regexp))))
`----

which uses the ag-recoll.sh script:

,----
| #!/bin/bash
| dir=$1; shift
| ors=$(printf '%s|' ${@})
| recoll -t -b $@ dir:$dir | sed -e "s/file:\/\///" | xargs -d '\n' ag --max-count 10 --group --line-number --column --color --color-match 30\;43 --color-path 1\;32 --smart-case ${ors%|}
`----


So, as an example, when I call ag-recoll with STRING 'openacc pgi' and
DIRECTORY /home/angelv/Learning, the result is like this:
http://picpaste.com/pics/ag-recoll-CdCrnsru.1510144253.png

where each line is a hyperlink to the corresponding match in the file,
you can use the common grep-mode commands to open a file, go to the next
match C-x `, etc.

I will be using this from now on, and if I find it useful I will try to
make it more flexible (being able to pass arguments to recoll and ag,
etc. [I'm a total noob with Emacs Lisp, so any suggestions on how to
improve the code are very welcome].

Cheers,
-- 
Ángel de Vicente
http://angel-de-vicente.blogspot.com/

Re: Emacs interface to Recoll other than Helm?

[Joost Kremers]

On Tue, Nov 07 2017, Angel de Vicente wrote:
> I've found that there is a Helm interface to it
> (https://github.com/emacs-helm/helm-recoll), but right now I'm 
> using Ivy
> (http://oremacs.com/swiper/) and if possible I would like to 
> avoid
> installing Helm just for the integration with Recoll (plus, I'm 
> not sure
> if it will clash somehow with the installed Ivy?).
>
> Any pointers/suggestions/ideas welcome.

I don't know if there's an ivy interface, but I've found that 
writing an ivy interface for something isn't all that difficult. 
The ivy manual at <http://oremacs.com/swiper/#api> has the info 
and some examples. Of course you'll need to know some Elisp in 
order to be able to do it...

-- 
Joost Kremers
Life has its moments