From 7fa58b792c5f432a46008ee720afeb3a6ef4c81b Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: David Bremner Date: Sun, 18 Jan 2015 13:59:30 +0100 Subject: [PATCH] doc: add material on stemming and wildcards This is lightly massaged from the searching page on the wiki. --- doc/man7/notmuch-search-terms.rst | 27 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 27 insertions(+) diff --git a/doc/man7/notmuch-search-terms.rst b/doc/man7/notmuch-search-terms.rst index 54138d23..7fb4a27d 100644 --- a/doc/man7/notmuch-search-terms.rst +++ b/doc/man7/notmuch-search-terms.rst @@ -135,6 +135,33 @@ operators, but will have to be protected from interpretation by the shell, (such as by putting quotation marks around any parenthesized expression). +Stemming +-------- + +**Stemming** 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. + +Wildcards +--------- + +It is possible to use a trailing '\*' as a wildcard. A search for +'wildc\*' will match 'wildcard', 'wildcat', etc. + + Boolean and Probabilistic Prefixes ----------------------------------