No. Never. NO! Go Away! This is not what I want.

I want a reasonable indexing and fulltext search environment for my email, my plain text files and similar. Nothing fancy required.

Until now I used glimpse, very much non-free software, ancient and quirky but It Works. Unfortunately the guys behind mh-e (emacs interface to mh) dropped glimpse support. Bastards! Waaah! I had made some patches to support multi-index glimpsing, recently...<checks timestamp>..ok, two years ago. Still, mh-e doesn't evolve that fast. Exmh still supports (only) glimpse, so I could live with no mh-e glimpse...no, I can't. This is just not good enough.

So I embark on a quest for free indexers and try the two most popular alternatives, swish++ and namazu.

<some time passes...curses are uttered...crap manpages are read...> And The Winner Is: glimpse. sigh The others suck planets through wormholes.

swish++ has nice features like extraction of mail headers. But its defaults are silly, non-adjustable (short of recompiling) and when tested it occasionally doesn't return documents without giving any useful info to debug the issue. It also doesn't work well with QP in headers: I could live with it if it didn't grok QP there at all, but it works somewhat. And fails when not expected to. A search tool that doesn't search is really what I need now.

namazu is glacially slow indexing things, and works even less well than swish++. Its documentation documents just nothing useful, and namazu badly refreshes my prejudices against quite some Japanese software.

Great. At least mh-e's CVS has the diff I need readily available. Success!