From: David Bremner <david@tethera.net>
To: David Bremner <david@tethera.net>, Jani Nikula <jani@nikula.org>,
	notmuch@notmuchmail.org
Subject: [Patch v2 1/4] doc: add material on stemming and wildcards
Date: Mon, 23 Feb 2015 21:05:34 +0100
Message-Id: <1424721937-5797-2-git-send-email-david@tethera.net>
In-Reply-To: <1424721937-5797-1-git-send-email-david@tethera.net>
References: <87a9163fpf.fsf@maritornes.cs.unb.ca>
	<1424721937-5797-1-git-send-email-david@tethera.net>
Precedence: list

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 54138d2..7fb4a27 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
 ----------------------------------
 
-- 
2.1.4