# Recoll

6 Hacker News commenters recommended Recoll and 1 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 5 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Free desktop search engine that indexes text across many folders and file types quickly and runs on modest hardware.

## Why people recommend it

- Fast indexing, light on resources (2 comments): "recoll indexed the whole thing in an afternoon" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49670740)) "it's far smaller and it runs on a potato" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50273449))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Everything by voidtools](https://hackerapproved.com/p/everything.md): 78 recommend
- [Cardinal file search for macOS](https://hackerapproved.com/p/cardinal.md): 7 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Recoll", https://hackerapproved.com/p/recoll/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).