First: I use neomutt + mbsync (formerly isync) + notmuch. The local searching was at first a nerd special interest project but has actually become very useful for searching, filtering and otherwise managing my mail.

Second: the button on the article to submit to HN seems to be somewhat... off? I wouldn't mind one that would submit in the first instance and then link to the HN thread on subsequent clicks but having a button that just loads a round into the chamber for all users clicking on it seems like incitement to blogspam.

I’m trying the same setup as you, but I cannot figure out how to use not much from within neomutt. I feel like I am missing something fairly straightforward because apparently not much is integrated into neomutt. Any pointers would be great!

I got it set up with Luke Smith's muttwizard [0]. The actual integration feels a bit clunky (the UI closes when entering a query, but then results are returned to the UI) but it does work quite well. I think the interesting corollary one finds is that a normal filter (I think it's called 'Limit' in mutt?) often does the job most of the time and one doesn't have to think about how the Inverted index is going to treat the query.

[0] https://github.com/LukeSmithxyz/mutt-wizard