mirror of https://github.com/djcb/mu.git
b75f9f508b
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.
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README
README
======
Welcome to mu!
---------------
Given the enormous amounts of e-mail many people gather and the importance of
e-mail message in our work-flows, it's essential to quickly deal with all that
mail - in particular, to instantly find that one important e-mail you need right
now.
[mu] is a tool for dealing with e-mail messages stored in the
Maildir-format. =mu='s purpose in life is to help you to quickly find the
messages you need; in addition, it allows you to view messages, extract
attachments, create new maildirs, and so on. See the [mu cheatsheet] for some
examples. =mu= is fully documented.
After indexing your messages into a [Xapian]-database, you can search them using
a custom query language. You can use various message fields or words in the
body text to find the right messages.
Built on top of =mu= are some extensions (included in this package):
- mu-for-emacs ([mu4e]): a full-featured e-mail client that runs inside emacs
- [mu-guile]: bindings for the Guile/Scheme programming language (version 2.0
and later)
- a toy GTK+-interface called 'mug' (in the 'toys/' subdir)
=mu= is written in C and a bit of C++ (to interface with Xapian), with =mu4e=
written in [Emacs-Lisp] and =mu-guile= in a mix of C and Scheme.
Note, =mu= is available in Debian/Ubuntu under the name =maildir-utils=;
apparently because they don't like short names. It's also possible to confuse
that name with the [GNU Mailutils] project (which is totally unrelated) - but
now you have been warned.
[mu]: http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu
[mu cheatsheet]: http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/cheatsheet.html
[Xapian]: http://www.xapian.org
[mu4e]: http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu4e.html
[mu-guile]: http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu/mu-guile.html
[Emacs-Lisp]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs-Lisp
[GNU Mailutils]: http://mailutils.org/