Re: [RFC] Gnus generalized search, part II

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Andrew Cohen <cohen@bu.edu> writes:

> Hi Eric:
>
> I noticed you have eliminated the 'shortcut option in nnir. This was
> important functionality which should probably be restored (stopping
> after the first match rather than finding all matches). For example its
> used in article referral (when the referral methods include 'nnir) where
> we are just trying to find a particular message-id.
>
> I originally implemented this as part of the criteria in the search
> query. Since these are going away in the universal search form the
> shortcut implementation will be different. Maybe just include another
> search term, like "?:" and "*:" for match-one and match-any, with "*:"
> the default?

Yup, I took that out, but only temporarily -- I'll put that or an
equivalent back in soon. I think I took it out before trying to
implement MULTISEARCH: servers with this capability won't need the group
loop at all, they can search many/all groups with a single command. That
should provide a nice speedup for all searches on servers that support
it (curse you, Dovecot!), but in particular for the message-id search.
Anyway, it will get put back in.

I've actually ended up restoring something like the criteria: I
mentioned in an earlier message allowing "meta" search terms like
thread, sort, limit, or count. Those will be parsed and stored outside
the query itself. A "single result" key could live there, but I'm not
sure it's necessary: a search on message-id implies single result, and
you could use "limit" in other cases.

> And on the long list of things that would be nice: when inputting the
> universal query string TAB should complete on the preset search keys.
> If I want to search for an author the current nnir allows this with only
> a few keystrokes: C-u G G; "author-name" RET; f TAB; RET. gnus-search
> should allow something similar.

Right now you can truncate search keys arbitrarily, so long as they
remain unambiguous. Ie, "subject:flights" can be given as
"subj:flights", or even "su:flights" (but "s" alone is ambiguous with
"since"). Is that what you meant? In your example above, what does the
"f" actually complete to? I would have thought that would be the search
string.

> (Who is beginning to think that you and I are the only two who will ever
> use this new stuff).

I was starting to think the same thing! Glad to see others chiming in.