Difference between &total, &limit, and &display

I have been looking at the documentation and trying to read the code to figure out what exactly &total, &limit, and &display mean. The documentation is very vague. How do these interact/relate to each other?

Can somebody please explain the differences between them?

For example, why does this return 1 result

but this returns 0 results?

(I am trying to display the latest document in that folder).

MODx version: 0.9.5
Ditto version: 2.0.1

&display (which is &summarize in 2.0.1) is the number of documents Ditto should display.
&total is the maximum number of documents to retrieve (say with pagination where &display controls the number of documents per page).
&limit is an alias to MySQL’s limit and is for advanced uses only.

Can you explain the difference between &total and &limit in more detail? I know that &limit sets the LIMIT parameter in the SQL. What does &total do?

You should not worry about &limit (which is now &queryLimit per ticket #43) as this is mainly for situations with > 1000 documents.
&total is the total number of documents Ditto can retrieve.

Hey Mark, just out of curiosity, the sorting occurs prior to applying the &total constraint, right?

Yes it should.