Notmuch Cheatsheet

I've used notmuch with the mutt email client for years, but mostly as a tool to search my email. I organize my email by folders or directories, and archive based on year (e.g., year2020, etc). In the last few years, though, I've begun to accumulate email folders that I used to manage various projects, and recently, I've felt like these folders are muddying my system up. To fix this, I finally started to explore notmuch tags, and now I'm a fan. I assembled this cheat sheet to help me remember some of the more common commands.

Notmuch commands

We generally run these commands on the command line.

I don't run all the commands above on the command line. For example, I update the Notmuch DB within Mutt when I sync my email. Here's an example from my .muttrc file:

# RETRIEVING EMAIL
macro index,pager  "clear ; /usr/bin/mbsync -a ; notmuch new" "Retrieve new email"
	

Useful search patterns

I generally run searches like those listed in the table below from within the Mutt email client. Search is bound to the F8 key. Here's the macro for that, which I likely got from the Notmuch website a long time ago:

# SEARCH EMAIL
macro index  \
"set my_old_pipe_decode=\$pipe_decode my_old_wait_key=\$wait_key nopipe_decode nowait_key\
notmuch-mutt -r --prompt search\
`echo ${XDG_CACHE_HOME:-$HOME/.cache}/notmuch/mutt/results`\
set pipe_decode=\$my_old_pipe_decode wait_key=\$my_old_wait_key" \
"notmuch: search mail"