- notmuch understands a variety of standard and natural ways of express-
- ing dates and times, both in absolute terms ("2012-10-24") and in rela-
- tive terms ("yesterday"). Any number of relative terms can be combined
- ("1 hour 25 minutes") and an absolute date/time can be combined with
- relative terms to further adjust it. A non-exhaustive description of
- the syntax supported for absolute and relative terms is given below.
+ <b>Stemming</b> in notmuch means that these searches
+
+ notmuch search detailed
+ notmuch search details
+ notmuch search detail
+
+ will all return identical results, because Xapian first "reduces" the
+ term to the common stem (here 'detail') and then performs the search.
+
+ There are two ways to turn this off: a search for a capitalized word
+ will be performed unstemmed, so that one can search for "John" and not
+ get results for "Johnson"; phrase searches are also unstemmed (see
+ below for details). Stemming is currently only supported for English.
+ Searches for words in other languages will be performed unstemmed.
+</pre>
+
+<h3> Wildcards</h3>
+<pre>
+ It is possible to use a trailing '*' as a wildcard. A search for
+ 'wildc*' will match 'wildcard', 'wildcat', etc.
+</pre>
+
+<h3> Boolean and Probabilistic Prefixes</h3>
+<pre>
+ Xapian (and hence notmuch) prefixes are either <b>boolean</b>, supporting
+ exact matches like "<u>tag:inbox</u>" or <b>probabilistic</b>, supporting a more
+ flexible <b>term</b> based searching. The prefixes currently supported by not‐
+ much are as follows.
+
+ ┌───────────────────────────┬────────────────────────────┐
+ │Boolean
+ ├───────────────────────────┼────────────────────────────┤
+ │
+ │
+ │ <b>thread:</b> <b>folder:</b> │ <b>subject:</b> <b>attach‐</b> │
+ │ <b>path:</b> │ <b>ment:</b> <b>mimetype:</b> │
+ └───────────────────────────┴────────────────────────────┘
+</pre>
+
+<h3> Terms and phrases</h3>
+<pre>
+ In general Xapian distinguishes between lists of terms and <b>phrases</b>.
+ Phrases are indicated by double quotes (but beware you probably need to
+ protect those from your shell) and insist that those unstemmed words
+ occur in that order. One useful, but initially surprising feature is
+ that the following are equivalant ways to write the same phrase.
+
+ · "a list of words"