Re: Advanced search with wildcard using notmuch for mutt

[David Bremner <david@tethera.net>]

Michael J Gruber <michaeljgruber+grubix+git@gmail.com> writes:


> Using xapian commands, one could extract all stems and grep those for a
> term which one "remembers partially" (often happened to me), and then feed
> that into notmuch. Might be worthwhile scripting or even integrating into
> notmuch (sexp?).

The words are stored unstemmed as well, so in principle we could extract
those and do some kind of fuzzy search on them to construct
queries. This is what notmuch already does for regex searches on fields
other than from, subject, and mid. The reason this is not too attractive
for the message body is that it works on a per word basis, and most uses
of regex (although not the one under discussion) involve matching
multiple words. Currently Xapian only supports trailing wildcards (which
would not help here), but we could do that for body words. It just
doesn't (or hasn't) seemed like such a common use case. 

Alas, none of the forward looking discussion really helps the original
poster.