mu's query parser is the piece of software that turns your queries
into something the Xapian database can understand. So, if you query
"maildir:/inbox and subject:bla" this must be translated into a
Xapian::Query object which will retrieve the sought after messages.
Since mu's beginning, almost a decade ago, this parser was based on
Xapian's default Xapian::QueryParser. It works okay, but wasn't really
designed for the mu use-case, and had a bit of trouble with anything
that's not A..Z (think: spaces, special characters, unicode etc.).
Over the years, mu added quite a bit of pre-processing trickery to
deal with that. Still, there were corner cases and bugs that were
practically unfixable.
The solution to all of this is to have a custom query processor that
replaces Xapian's, and write it from the ground up to deal with the
special characters etc. I wrote one, as part of my "future, post-1.0
mu" reseach project, and I have now backported it to the mu 0.9.19.
From a technical perspective, this is a major cleanup, and allows us
to get rid of much of the fragile preprocessing both for indexing and
querying. From and end-user perspective this (hopefully) means that
many of the little parsing issues are gone, and it opens the way for
some new features.
From an end-user perspective:
- better support for special characters.
- regexp search! yes, you can now search for regular expressions, e.g.
subject:/h.ll?o/
will find subjects with hallo, hello, halo, philosophy, ...
As you can imagine, this can be a _heavy_ operation on the database,
and might take quite a bit longer than a normal query; but it can be
quite useful.
Display the signers in the signature headers, so users can easily very
that a verified signed message was indeed signed by the expected sender.
We can't check using 'From:' automatically as that gives too many false
negatives.
Added support for sorting by mailing-list; note that this ultimately is
a sort by the 'list-id', so the items will be in that alphabetical
order, which is not necessarily the same as the order of the friendly
names.
Update mu4e~headers-quit-buffer and mu4e~main-menu.
mu4e~headers-quit-buffer in single-window mode now kills current buffer
instead of quitting mu4e.
mu4e~main-menu is updated to redisplay the main menu on context switch
or unknown keybinding, display errors in commands better, and to handle
C-g and ESC keys.
Thanks to Joost Kremers for the suggestions.
Even though the user may be editing this expression there is no reason
to not have the mu4e~headers-search-hist present for the prompt. Emacs
will only replace it with system wide history which would likely
contain irrelevant history for the action.
Single-window mode is meant to minimize mu4e window operations (opening,
killing, resizing, etc) and buffer changes, while still retaining the
view and headers buffers. In addition, it replaces mu4e main view with a
minibuffer prompt containing the same information.
