Searching in Mutt with Notmuch

I’m on a Mutt kick again lately. One thing I’ve never loved about Mutt is that searching large archives can be slow. I’m used to the nearly instantaneous response when using Notmuch for search. To help with this, I’ve switched to using NeoMutt, which has some nice built-in support for Notmuch.

Here is the relevant portion of my .muttrc file.

set nm_db_limit = 5000
set nm_default_url = "notmuch:///Users/jbaty/Mail"
set nm_open_timeout = 5
set virtual_spool_file = yes
set nm_query_window_enable=yes
set nm_query_window_duration=2
set nm_query_window_timebase="month" # or "hour", "day", "week", "month", "year"
set nm_query_window_or_terms="tag:unread and tag:flagged"
# read entire thread of the current message
bind index,pager + entire-thread
# generate virtual folder from query
bind index,pager \cf vfolder-from-query
bind index < vfolder-window-backward
bind index > vfolder-window-forward

Another fun thing in NeoMutt is that it has incorporated virtual-folders, so I can do things like this:

virtual-mailboxes "Flagged" "notmuch://?query=tag:flagged"
virtual-mailboxes "Today" "notmuch://?query=date:today"

So far it works a treat. Searches are so fast in Notmuch! I like that I can limit the initial results to a specific time window (via nm_query_window_timebase). I use “month”. Then, I can page through a month of results at a time using «/kbd> and >.