Re: Advanced search with wildcard using notmuch for mutt

io <io-Q/[email protected]> writes:

> what xapian 'indexing system' did was to index the entire sentence
> 'xxx_yyy' and you will not be able to find any sentence which contain
> the word 'yyy'?

I'm curious that you refer to xxx_yyy as a sentence. In the contexts I
am familiar with, the point of _ is to join things together into one
word (or one identifier/token). Other than that your understanding seems
correct.

> xapian should have this simple wildcard feature which 'grep'(search)
> offer. ($grep '*word*' file). It is strange that xapian restrict the
> search to 'trailing wildcard' only.

I guess the restriction is based on what is easy to do efficiently with
the Xapian database (find prefixes).  If I remember correctly there was
some work in progress to support leading wildcards in Xapian. I can't
find relevant discussion now, but I CC'ed the Xapian list in case
someone remembers that.

> Novice user who get introduce to notmuch just want to run the search
> and get the result straight away.

Generally the focus of Xapian (and thus notmuch) is on words and
phrases like "bob ate my pizza". I agree this is disappointing for
someone who wants "all the flexibility of grep, but faster".