# README --- Information GNU Hyperbole users and maintainers should read
#
# See the "HY-ABOUT" file for a description of GNU Hyperbole.
#
# Author: Bob Weiner
#
# Orig-Date: 19-Oct-91 at 03:27:47
#
# Copyright (C) 1989-2016 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
# See the "HY-COPY" file for license information.
#
# This file is part of GNU Hyperbole.
We hope you enjoy using GNU Hyperbole. Feel free to mail or post news
containing this file wherever it may be of use.
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* Table of Contents
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* Files
* Programmer Quick Reference
* User Quotes
* Why was Hyperbole developed?
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* Files
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See the "HY-ABOUT" file for a description and overview of Hyperbole.
See "DEMO" for a demonstration of standard Hyperbole button capabilities.
This is the best way to initially interactively learn about Hyperbole after
installing it.
"man/im/demo.png", "man/im/hyperbole-cv.png" and "koutline.png" are
screenshots of Hyperbole in action.
HyControl is Hyperbole's frame and window manager; a long video
demonstrating most of HyControl's features is available at
https://youtu.be/M3-aMh1ccJk.
See the "HY-NEWS" file for a summary of new features in this release.
See the "INSTALL" file for installation and invocation instructions.
See the "HY-COPY" and "COPYING" files for license information.
See the "MANIFEST" file for summaries of Hyperbole distribution files.
Various forms of the reference manual for Hyperbole are below the
"man/" subdirectory.
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* Programmer Quick Reference
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"MANIFEST" summarizes most of the files in the distribution.
See "DEMO" for a demonstration of standard Hyperbole button capabilities.
This is the best way to initially interactively learn about Hyperbole.
The Hyperbole Manual is a reference manual, not a simple introduction.
Naming conventions:
- All Hyperbole-specific code files begin with an 'h', aside from the
Koutliner files which are in the kotl/ subdirectory and begin with a 'k'.
- Hyperbole user-interface files begin with 'hui-' or 'hmous'.
- Files that define implicit button types begin with 'hib'.
- Encapsulations of foreign systems begin with 'hsys-'.
Most of the standard Emacs user interface for Hyperbole is located in
"hui.el". Most of the Hyperbole application programming interface can be
found in "hbut.el". "hbdata.el" encapsulates the button attribute storage
implemented by Hyperbole. "hmail.el" provides a basic abstract interface
for integrating mail readers other than Rmail into Hyperbole.
See the "(hyperbole)Questions and Answers" appendix in the Hyperbole
manual for information on how to alter the default context-sensitive
Hyperbole key bindings (Smart Keys).
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* User Quotes
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*** MAN I love Hyperbole!!! Wow! ***
-- Ken Olstad
Cheyenne Software, Inc.
-------
I *love* koutlines.
-- Bob Glickstein
Z-Code Software Corporation
-------
One of the nicest things about Hyperbole is that it's available
everywhere. Org-mode is a mode and its features are only available in
*.org files. For instance if you dropped into `eshell' or `ansi-term' and
did `ls', you can move point to any of the directory's contents, do M-RET
(or Shift-Button2) and jump to that file. And that's just one example.
Note that this means that all Hyperbole functionality is available in
*.org files as well. To me, except for the Hyperbole outliner, that means
complementary not conflicting. It's Hyperbole *and* org-mode, not
Hyperbole vs. org-mode.
Additionally, off the bat, I found it very well documented and for me
that's a proxy for the quality of a package. The maintainers are quite
responsive. There's plenty more functionality that I haven't uncovered yet
but due to the ease of installation and the quality of the documentation,
digging into it is actually fun.
-- Aditya Siram
-------
For me, Emacs isn't Emacs without Hyperbole. I have depended on Hyperbole
daily since 1992, when I first started using it to manage my development
environment. It didn't take long before I could summon almost any
information I needed directly from within my editing environment with an
implicit button. Since I almost never have to slow down to look for
things--one context-dependent button usually produces exactly what I need
--I am able to maintain focus on the task I am working on and complete it
more quickly. With its gestural interface, seamless integration with other
Emacs packages and incredibly useful set of core features. I think that
Hyperbole is one of the best designed and most easily extensible software
products I have ever come across. It is certainly the one which has made
the biggest improvement in my personal productivity.
-- Chris Nuzum
Co-founder, Traction Software, Inc.
-------
I've found Hyperbole (in conjunction with XEmacs) to be very useful
for signal processing algorithm development.
For me, it has almost completely obsoleted the engineering notebook:
I keep a set of files with ideas, algorithms, and results, linked
together and to the implementation in C++ files. Using XEmacs'
support for embedding graphics, I've written a mode that accepts
image tags (formatted like HTML), and reads in GIF files to display
plots. I have another program that converts the file to HTML (not
perfect, but adequate), so I can put any aspect of development on
our internal web for others to see.
-- Farzin Guilak
Protocol Systems, Inc., Engineer
-------
I am blind and have been using Hyperbole since 1992. I used to use a PC as
a talking terminal attached to a UNIX system, but then I developed
Emacspeak which lets me use Emacs and Hyperbole from standard UNIX
workstations with an attached voice synthesizer.
My main uses are:
1) Global and implicit buttons for jumping to ftp sites.
2) The contact manager with Emacspeak support.
3) Explicit buttons as part of comments made about a structured document.
Each button jumps to the document section referred to by the comment.
This is very, very useful.
4) The Hyperbole Koutliner, which I find a very useful tool. I've
implemented Emacspeak extensions to support it.
-- TV Raman
Google Inc.
-------
I've been a grateful Hyperbole user for a few years now. Hyperbole's
flexibility and ease of use is a marvel.
Mainly, I write easy little implicit button types (and corresponding action
types) to make my life easier. For example, I have an implicit button type
to bury certain buffers when I click at their bottoms, one that recognizes
a bug report record in various contexts and edits it, one that links pieces
of test output in a log file to the corresponding test case source code
(EXTREMELY helpful in interpreting test output), others that support our
homegrown test framework, one that handles tree dired mode the way I'd
like, one that completely handles wico menus (I've also overloaded the
wconfig actions triggered by diagonal mouse drags with wicos actions), and
a couple that support interaction with BBDB.
Other than that, I keep a global button file with 30 or so explicit buttons
that do various little things, and I index saved mail messages by putting
explicit link-to-mail buttons in an outline file.
-- Ken Olstad
Cheyenne Software, Inc.
-------
In general, Hyperbole is an embeddable, highly extensible hypertext
tool. As such, I find it very useful. As it stands now, Hyperbole is
particularly helpful for organizing ill-structured or loosely coupled
information, in part because there are few tools geared for this purpose.
Hyperbole also possesses a lot of potential in supporting a wider
spectrum of structuredness, ranging from unstructured to highly
structured environments, as well as structural changes over time.
Major Uses:
* Menu interface to our own collaborative support environment called
CoReView: This interface brings together all top-level user commands
into a single partitioned screen, and allows the end user to interact
with the system using simple mouse-clicking instead of the meta-x key.
* Gateway to internet resources: this includes links to major Internet
archive sites of various types of information. Links are made at both
directory and file levels.
* Alternative directory organizer: The hierarchical nature of the Unix
file system sometimes makes it difficult to find things quickly and
easily using directory navigational tools such as dired. Hyperbole
enables me to create various "profile" views of my directory tree, with
entries in these views referring to files anywhere in the hierarchy.
* Organizing and viewing online documentation: using Hyperbole along with
Hyper-man and Info makes it truly easy to look up online documentation.
* Other desktop organization tasks: including links to various mail
folders, saved newsgroup conversation threads, online note-taker,
emacs-command invocations, etc.
-- Dadong Wan
University of Hawaii
-------
Hyperbole is the first hyper-link system I've run across that is
actually part of the environment I use regularly, namely Emacs. The
complete flexibility of the links is both impressive and expected -- the
idea of making the link itself programmable is clever, and given that one
assumes the full power of Emacs. Being able to send email with buttons
in it is a very powerful capability. Using ange-ftp mode, one can make
file references "across the world" as easily as normal file references.
-- Mark Eichin
Cygnus Support
-------
I just wanted to say how much I enjoy using the Hyperbole Koutliner.
It is a great way to quickly construct very readable technical documents
that I can pass around to others. Thanks for the great work.
-- Jeff Fried
Informix
-------
The Hyperbole system provides a nice interface to exploring corners of
Unix that I didn't know existed before.
-- Craig Smith
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* Why was Hyperbole developed?
===========================================================================
Hyperbole was originally designed to aid in research aimed at Personalized
Information production/retrieval Environments (PIEs). Hyperbole was a
PIE Manager that provided services to PIE Tools. PIEmail, a mail reader was
the only PIE Tool developed as part of this research but Hyperbole has
greatly expanded since then and has long been a production quality toolset.
An examination of many hypertext environments as background research did
not turn up any that seemed suitable for the research envisioned, mainly
due to the lack of rich, portable programmer and user environments. We also
tired of trying to manage our own distributed information pools with standard
UNIX tools. And so Hyperbole was conceived and raved about until it
got its name.
Since then Hyperbole has proved indispensible at improving information
access and organization in daily use over many years. Why not start
improving your information handling efficiency today?