consult recoll with live preview

Lately, i've gravitated towards recoll as a unified search engine for all my local data, including org and text notes, documents in PDF or similar formats, HTML files, and local email. As a result, my little consult-recoll package has gone up a few notches up in my list. i've just released version 0.5, featuring live previews.

Recoll is a local search engine that knows how to index a wide variety of file formats. It also offers a sophisticated query language, and, for some document kinds, snippets of the text of the document that actually match your query: that's always been one of my favourite features, and wanted to bring it to emacs.

i found consult's live previews a very nice venue to bring snippets into emacs, via a new version of consult-recoll, and there you go, just a small matter of programming¹.

There are several things of this package that make me happy. For one, it's very small (less than 200 lines of code, including comments) and does quite a bit, thanks to the help of consult on the emacs side and of recoll on the system's side. In my opinion, it's a very good example of how the operative environment provided by emacs brings the Unix philosophy to the next level: here, it's gluing together functionality provided by emacs packages (completing read, consult's asynchronous searches and previews, and so on), and the indexing and search capabilities of a totally unrelated, orthogonal program, recoll, which in turn delegates to a swarm of other unix programs (such as antiword, unrtf, poppler, pstotext and a long etc) to extract information from local files². Very pleasant!