Search

This page explains how to find a message in the list of tt with /, how to search the whole mail cache of an account with g/, and how n and N go from one match to the next.

Try it

tt --demo

With the focus on the list, type /. A line that starts with / opens at the bottom. Type liskov and press Enter. The selection goes to the first message from Barbara Liskov, and the bottom bar says Match 1 of 33: liskov. Press n for the next one and N for the previous one.

How it finds

• The search looks at the sender and the subject of each message that the list holds.
• It is plain text, and the case does not matter: liskov finds Liskov. There is no regular expression and no wildcard.
• Enter selects the first match after the selected message. Esc closes the line and searches nothing.
• / and then Enter on an empty line repeats the last search.
• The line has the same editing keys as the command line.

Going on

Keys	What they do
/	ask for a text and select the first match after the selected message
n	the next match of the last search
N	the previous match of the last search
5n, 5N	five matches on, or five back

A count before / is ignored. A count before n or N is not.

The bottom bar

It says	When
Match 3 of 12: report	the third of twelve matches is selected
Match 1 of 12: report (search hit the bottom)	n went past the last match and started again at the top
Match 12 of 12: report (search hit the top)	N went past the first match and started again at the bottom
No match for 'report'	no message of the list has the text
No previous search	n or N before any search

The text stays until the next key, then the status line says message n of 200 again.

Search the mail cache

/ looks only at the list. When the mail cache is on, g/ searches its index instead: the sender, the subject and the body of the messages, in every folder of the open account.

With the focus on the list, type g/. A line that starts with all/ opens at the bottom. Type a word and press Enter. The best hit is selected, in its own folder: the sidebar goes to that folder and the list shows it. The bottom bar says Hit 1 of 12 in Archive: Invoice for November. n and N go through the hits, from the best one on.

• The index holds what the cache has seen: the sender and the subject of every message that tt listed, and the body of every message that I opened. A folder that I never opened has nothing in it, and a body that I never read is not found.
• Case and accents do not matter, every word must match, and every word matches as a prefix: fattur nov finds Fattura di novembre.
• It keeps the 50 best hits. A blank line repeats the last search and goes to the next hit.
• The list holds the newest 1000 messages of a folder. A hit older than that opens its folder, but the selection stays where it was and the bar still names the hit.
• A hit whose folder is not in the sidebar yet (the folders of an account are read when I select it) is not opened. The bar says where it is: Hit 2 of 12 is in 'Archive/2019', which the sidebar does not show: ….
• With the cache off the bar says The mail cache is off: set enabled = true in the [cache] section. With --demo it says There is no mail to search..
• A / after it takes n and N back to the list.

What it does not search

• Only the list and only the messages it holds. The tree has no search: / in the tree does nothing.
• Only the messages that are loaded: the newest 1000 of the folder. An older message is not found.
• Not the body of a message. For the body, use g/ above, or tcli from a shell: see The cache.
• The match is not highlighted in the row, and there is no backward search with ?.

The same from the command line

/ runs the command search.run with the text. It can be run from the command line or bound to a key:

:search.run "weekly report"
:search.cache invoice

search.cache runs the search of the mail cache, as g/ does.

The keys are lines of keybind.lua. A keybind.lua written before the search existed has none of them. Add these lines and run tt again:

keys.bind("list", "/", "search.start")
keys.bind("list", "n", "search.next")
keys.bind("list", "N", "search.previous")
keys.bind("list", "g/", "search.cache-start")

To change one of them, see Change a key.