A while ago, Bob Weiner asked me to take a look at Hyperbole and maybe write a post about it. It’s been in my queue to do that ever since but Hyperbole is a large and complex system and every time I tried, figuring it out seemed too daunting so I kept putting it off. Then Weiner gave a talk about Hyperbole to the NYC Emacs Meetup and I thought the video would be a good introduction and help me figure things out.
The video did help but the system is much like Org-mode in that it does so many things it’s hard to write a short explanation. Indeed, the video is over and hour and ten minutes and still didn’t cover everything. The basic idea—as I understand it—is to provide a mode that manages the display, retrieval, and linking of text across all of Emacs.
The primary active object in Hyperbole is the button. These can link to a piece of text in the same or another file, a Web site, an Info file or many other similarly things. They can also initiate actions. You can, in fact, tie a button to a piece of Elisp and have it perform any arbitrary action. The capabilities are very rich and can be invoked from anywhere within Emacs.
As far as Irreal is concerned, any future posts about Hyperbole will be like those about Org: they will focus on one particular aspect of the system and how it solves some problem or another. Before that happens, though, I’m going to have to read the manual and actually use the system. There’s a lot to learn.