From: David Bremner <david@tethera.net>
Date: Sun, 18 Jan 2015 12:59:30 +0000 (+0100)
Subject: doc: add material on stemming and wildcards
X-Git-Tag: 0.20~57
X-Git-Url: https://git.cworth.org/git?a=commitdiff_plain;h=7fa58b792c5f432a46008ee720afeb3a6ef4c81b;p=notmuch

doc: add material on stemming and wildcards

This is lightly massaged from the searching page on the wiki.
---

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
 ----------------------------------