Xatag tags files by writing human readable text to the extended attributes (xattr) of a file. It relies on the excellent desktop search application Recoll for indexing tags, and for integrating tags into desktop search queries.

Xatag will also provide a FUSE-based filesystem to search tagged files by browsing a hierarchy of your tags. The hierarchy is created dynamically as you navigate.

Keeping tags in the extended attributes is a Good Thing because the metadata can be transferred with the file when it is renamed, copied, or moved to another system (if it supports xattrs). Any database of tagged files can be recreated using data stored in the files.

For now, it is necessary to use the development version of Recoll and compile the source. This is a relatively easy procedure, at least on Debian and Ubuntu.

> sudo apt-get remove recoll # if it's already installed
> sudo apt-get install mercurial
> sudo apt-get install make g++ libxapian-dev libqt4-dev libqtwebkit-dev zlib1g-dev
> hg clone https://bitbucket.org/medoc/recoll
> cd recoll/src
> ./configure --prefix=/usr/local
> make
> sudo make install

Aside from the many Recoll configuration options that you'll want to investigate, xatag needs to inform Recoll to read and index tags from the extended attributes. Tell Recoll to read the xatag config files for Recoll by setting either of the environment varibles RECOLL_CONFTOP or RECOLL_CONFMID to the recoll folder inside your xatag config directory (~/.xatag/recoll, by default).

Put the following line in your ~/.xsessionrc file and in your shell startup file (e.g., ~/.bash_profile):

export RECOLL_CONFMID="$HOME/.xatag/recoll"

You can add one of these lines to your shell startup file (~/.bash_profile, or whatever). But since you'll most likely want to launch the Recoll GUI from outside of your shell, you'll need to also set up the environment variables for your session, using ~/.xsessionrc, ~/.pam_environment or something similar.

# Edit paths if you choose to set up your xatag config directory somewhere
# else.
#
# Pick one:
export RECOLL_CONFTOP="$HOME/.xatag/recoll"
export RECOLL_CONFMID="$HOME/.xatag/recoll"

The values set in the xatag-specific recoll directory will overwrite the global Recoll options if you set RECOLL_CONFMID. If you instead set RECOLL_CONFTOP then these options will overwrite the default config profile (typically found in ~/.recoll).

Currently, the xatag-specific Recoll directory does not overwrite settings that most Recoll users will already have configured.