From: David Bremner <david@tethera.net>
Date: Sun, 18 Jan 2015 12:59:31 +0000 (+0100)
Subject: doc: add more information on operators.
X-Git-Tag: 0.20~56
X-Git-Url: https://git.notmuchmail.org/git?p=notmuch;a=commitdiff_plain;h=4313be0a0c642ddb0a20f9df9d76e3bf7705cded

doc: add more information on operators.

More material borrowed from the wiki page on "searching"
---

diff --git a/doc/man7/notmuch-search-terms.rst b/doc/man7/notmuch-search-terms.rst
index 7fb4a27d..2ad100cf 100644
--- a/doc/man7/notmuch-search-terms.rst
+++ b/doc/man7/notmuch-search-terms.rst
@@ -124,16 +124,48 @@ The time range can also be specified using timestamps with a syntax of:
 Each timestamp is a number representing the number of seconds since
 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC.
 
+Operators
+---------
+
 In addition to individual terms, multiple terms can be combined with
-Boolean operators ( **and**, **or**, **not** , etc.). Each term in the
-query will be implicitly connected by a logical AND if no explicit
-operator is provided, (except that terms with a common prefix will be
-implicitly combined with OR until we get Xapian defect #402 fixed).
-
-Parentheses can also be used to control the combination of the Boolean
-operators, but will have to be protected from interpretation by the
-shell, (such as by putting quotation marks around any parenthesized
-expression).
+Boolean operators (**and**, **or**, **not**, and **xor**). Each term
+in the query will be implicitly connected by a logical AND if no
+explicit operator is provided (except that terms with a common prefix
+will be implicitly combined with OR).  The shorthand '-<term>' can be
+used for 'not <term>' but unfortunately this does not work at the
+start of an expression.  Parentheses can also be used to control the
+combination of the Boolean operators, but will have to be protected
+from interpretation by the shell, (such as by putting quotation marks
+around any parenthesized expression).
+
+In addition to the standard boolean operators, Xapian provides several
+operators specific to text searching.
+
+::
+
+        notmuch search term1 NEAR term2
+
+will return results where term1 is within 10 words of term2. The
+threshold can be set like this:
+
+::
+
+        notmuch search term1 NEAR/2 term2
+
+The search
+
+::
+
+        notmuch search term1 ADJ term2
+
+will return results where term1 is within 10 words of term2, but in the
+same order as in the query. The threshold can be set the same as with
+NEAR:
+
+::
+
+        notmuch search term1 ADJ/7 term2
+
 
 Stemming
 --------