News for release 0.38.3

[notmuch-wiki] / searching.mdwn

diff --git a/searching.mdwn b/searching.mdwn
index b250b5703d9f82993c009ac5d7dab53f837ac3ae..0564f721144236d2b8f3f8bc633742d9077d3b63 100644 (file)
--- a/searching.mdwn
+++ b/searching.mdwn
@@ -1,15 +1,19 @@
-# Searching with notmuch
+[[!img notmuch-logo.png alt="Notmuch logo" class="left"]]
+# Searching with Notmuch
 
 What good is an advanced indexing mail client if we don't know how to 
 use it to actually find e-mail?
 
-As notmuch is using Xapian
-[this page](http://xapian.org/docs/queryparser.html) is a good start. 
-However, the description is generic (applies to Xapian in general) and 
-its intended audience seems to be developers wanting to use Xapian in 
-their applications. This page attempts to explain it to users of notmuch (who 
-may not be familiar with Xapian). 'notmuch help search-terms' also has a few 
-pointers.
+The [notmuch-search-terms manual
+pages](https://notmuchmail.org/doc/latest/man7/notmuch-search-terms.html)
+should cover everything in a fairly concise manner. Please refer to
+that for any details.
+
+Notmuch uses the [Xapian](http://xapian.org/) search engine. The [Xapian
+QueryParser](http://xapian.org/docs/queryparser.html) documentation has
+a generic description of the search language. The intended audience is
+developers wanting to use Xapian in their applications; this page
+attempts to explain it to users of Notmuch.
 
 ## Stemming
 
@@ -164,14 +168,11 @@ Since notmuch is about (large) e-mail collections it is very useful to
 be able to search for e-mails within a specific date range. This will 
 work:
 
-        notmuch search <initial timestamp>..<final-timestamp>
-
-However, until a better syntax is implemented the only form accepted for 
-timestamps is Unix time (seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC), so the 
-utility 'date' can help:
-
-        notmuch search $(date +%s -d 2009-10-01)..$(date +%s)
+        notmuch search date:<since>..<until>
 
-Explanation: '+%s' will tell date to output Unix time format and -d will 
-tell date to output the date from 2009-10-01. See date(1) for more 
-details.
+For `<since>` and `<until>`, notmuch understands a variety of standard
+and natural ways of expressing dates and times, both in absolute terms
+("2012-10-24") and in relative terms ("yesterday"). Please refer to
+the [notmuch-search-terms
+manual](https://notmuchmail.org/doc/latest/man7/notmuch-search-terms.html)
+for details.