Manual Overview

Hyperbole is an efficient, programmable hypertextual information management system. It is intended for everyday work on any GNU Emacs platform. Hyperbole allows hypertext buttons to be embedded within unstructured and structured files, mail messages and news articles. It offers intuitive keyboard and mouse-based control of information display within multiple windows. It also provides point-and-click access to Info manuals, ftp archives, the World-Wide Web and much more.

This is a reference manual with extensive details about Hyperbole use. If you prefer a simpler, more interactive introduction to Hyperbole, the ../FAST-DEMO file included in the Hyperbole distribution demonstrates many of Hyperbole’s standard facilities without the need to read through this reference manual. The ../FAST-DEMO is a good way to rapidly understand some of what Hyperbole can do for you. Once Hyperbole is installed, (see Setup), you can access the ../FAST-DEMO with the key sequence {C-h h d d}.

See Glossary, for definitions of Hyperbole terms. In some cases, terms are not precisely defined within the body of this manual since they are defined within the glossary. Be sure to reference the glossary if a term is unclear to you. Although you need not have a keen understanding of all of these terms, a quick scan of the glossary helps throughout Hyperbole use.

See Setup, for explanations of how to obtain, install, configure and load Hyperbole for use. This appendix includes information on user-level settings that you may want to modify after you understand Hyperbole’s basic operation.

See Suggestion or Bug Reporting, for instructions on how to ask a question, suggest a feature or report a bug in Hyperbole. A few commonly asked questions are answered in this manual, see Questions and Answers. If you are interested in classic articles on hypertext, see References.

See Smart Keys, for an explanation of the innovative, context-sensitive mouse and keyboard Action and Assist Keys offered by Hyperbole. See Smart Key Reference, for a complete reference on what the Action and Assist Keys do in each particular context they recognize. See Smart Key Argument Selection, for how Hyperbole speeds selection of values when prompting for arguments.

Keep in mind as you read about using Hyperbole that in many cases, it provides a number of overlapping interaction methods that support differing work styles. In such instances, you need learn only one technique that suits you.

See Buttons, for an overview of Hyperbole buttons and how to use them. Hyperbole’s action-oriented button support is enabled via the global minor mode, hyperbole-mode.

See Menus, for summaries of Hyperbole menu commands and how to use the minibuffer-based menus that work on any display that Emacs supports.

See HyWiki, for Hyperbole’s markup-free, personal Wiki system for note-taking and automatic WikiWord highlighting and hyperlinking. It extends Org mode. HyWikiWord hyperlink buttons are automatically enabled for wiki pages below hywiki-directory. To enable them in text buffers outside of this directory, enable the global minor mode, hywiki-mode.

See HyNote, for a start on the very early stages of Hyperbole’s multi-format note taking system. HyNote supports Org, Markdown, Koutline and Emacs Outline file formats. HyNote works in any buffer where HyWiki support is active.

See HyControl, for how to quickly and interactively control what your Emacs windows and frames display and where they appear.

See Koutliner, for concept and usage information on the autonumbered, hypertextual outliner. It uses its own major mode. See Koutliner Keys, for a full summary of the outliner commands that are bound to keys.

See HyRolo, for concept and usage information on the rapid lookup, hierarchical, full-text record management system included with Hyperbole.

See Window Configurations, for instructions on how to save and restore the set of buffers and windows that appear within a frame. This feature lets you switch among working contexts easily, even on a dumb terminal. Such configurations last throughout a single session of editor usage only.

See Developing with Hyperbole, if you are a developer who is comfortable with Lisp.

See Future Work, for future directions in Hyperbole’s evolution.