On 05.04.16 12:47, Xu Wang wrote:
> I am so used to using notmuch integrated into mutt (via mutt-kz), that
> I would like to be able to understand how someone does *not* use
> notmuch. How do you search for a certain message? Is it simply a
> matter of the following?
Deleting around 90% of list traffic makes searching faster.
Organising what is retained, according to subject is an even greater
accelerator:
$ ls -1 mail/* | wc -l
1211
On the rare occasions I'm not sure where to look, grep always quickly
delivers the goods for me. It's generally not necessary to search all
1211 mailboxes, e.g.
$ grep foo mail/mutt_* > /tmp/matches
Opening /tmp/matches with vim, I can then use gf on likely candidates.
In more than a decade of this efficient practice, I've had not much
reason to seek any alternative. Just once it seemed to fail, until I
broadened a limited search, as above, to scan all files. I had archived
the post under a more relevant topic.
A simple but useful aid has been the shell function:
mls ()
{
ls -xF ~/mail/*$1*
}
Now any part of a subject name finds all related collections:
$ mls security
/home/erik/mail/cnc_linux_security /home/erik/mail/linux_security
/home/erik/mail/linux_security_hints /home/erik/mail/postfix_security
/home/erik/mail/ubuntu_security
In the latter half of several decades of software development, I took to
heart "Unix _is_ the IDE". Similarly, there's no need for mutt to do
more than be a good MUA, as perfectly good search capability pre-exists.
(For slightly faster searches, fgrep, and for modern regex, egrep.)
Erik
