I have accidentally pressed, say, n in mutt which puts me into search at the bottom of the screen Search for:. How do I exit from this if I don't want to search? I have tried esc and ctrl-c, but the first doesn't work and the second asks me whether I want to quit mutt, which I don't...
Ctrl-G will exit from all mutt prompts.
This is the standard quit keybinding in Emacs, so its probably inherited from there. Also works in bash.