Re: Org and Hyperbole

["Juan Manuel Macías" <maciaschain@posteo.net>]

Hi, Robert,

First of all, welcome to the list. And of course congratulations on all
the great work you've done with hyperbole. In my ignorance, when I
recently installed it from ELPA, I thought it was a relatively recent
package. But it seems that you have been developing it for a long time,
while adapting it to the latest GNU Emacs trends. This is fortunate,
because what is new is combined with experience and the residue of work
already done over the years.

At the moment I am not going to comment here anything specific on the
technical level, because I have been using hyperbole for a short time
and my knowledge of this package is still very limited. I think the best
strategy for using hyperbole, from a user's point of view, is to simply
use it. And gradually discover which parts of hyperbole can be useful
and integrate into one's workflow. This is more practical than trying to
start from a global conceptual base (IMHO). I'm still having trouble
explaining what Org is for and what Org really is :-). But this is also
the case with Emacs itself. When I first started using Emacs I thought
it was just a text editor, like any other text editor. In fact, on my
first day with Emacs I hated it dearly and uninstalled it in a rage. Now
it's my desktop environment and my work environment, with EXWM, with
Org, among others, and hopefully with Hyperbole as well. I suppose that
it is the daily use that is making us connect the dots...

I really like the implicit link system, and it is really easy to define
new links. I have already defined a set of new buttons for LaTeX, which
recognize commands and environments and point to the local TeX live
documentation or texstackexchange.com. And with avy they work great.
Have you thought about giving a support for avy? In any case it is easy
to add a new avy action to avy-dispatch-alist.

Best regards,

Juan Manuel 

Robert Weiner writes:

> Hi:
>
> Thanks to Juan for starting this thread and the interesting
> conversation it has started.  I just joined this mail list, so I don't
> have the prior messages and can't reply to the thread, so I have
> started this new one.
>
> I am the author of Hyperbole and would be happy to answer questions
> concerning Hyperbole today (so you don't have to answer based on
> experience from the 1990s).  Hyperbole has been modernized for use
> with Org mode and Emacs 28 and continues to develop.  There are videos
> that demonstrate some of its features in simple, understandable ways.
> Hyperbole is a single Emacs package that can be installed and
> uninstalled quickly for testing.  It is largely a global minor mode,
> so you can also disable it quickly if you ever care to.  In 20 minutes
> you can get through the builtin, interactive demo and be on your way
> to basic yet powerful usage.  We have listened to much feedback in the
> last few years and made it much more approachable.
>
> I find most of the confusion is people trying to understand how
> Hyperbole works under the covers rather than just following the
> tutorial and exploring it.  Hyperbole can be hacked on if you are a
> moderate to advanced programmer but it is meant to be used, like Org
> mode.  Hyperbole recognizes many, many common contexts in buffers that
> could serve as hyperlinks (paths, URLs, multiple key sequences, mail
> addresses, and on and on) and performs the typically desired action
> when you press its Action Key {M-RET} on these 'implicit buttons'.
> You get all this for free with no effort on your part.  Then if you
> want to extend such behavior, as you have seen a bit of, you can
> define your own implicit button and action types once and then
> activate an infinite number of matching implicit buttons.  For
> example, in an Emacs shell buffer, type:
>
>    echo $PATH
>
> then press the {M-RET} key or Shift-Middle mouse button on any path
> there and jump right to it.  I find that very useful as a simple
> example.  People are often surprised at how many things simply work
> right out of the box because such broad context-sensitive behavior is
> difficult to develop and rarely seen.  Just try it out and you should
> find some contexts that you can leverage rapidly.  {C-h A} displays
> what Hyperbole's Action Key will do in any context so you can always
> check and learn before activating anything.  We say: Hyperbole brings
> your text to life.  Like Org and Emacs, it provides an extensive
> environment that you can grow into across time, getting ever more
> productive rather than hitting a ceiling as with most point
> packages/tools.
>
> I am happy to answer questions and discuss ways we can make Hyperbole
> and Org work even better together; one direct question per message
> would typically work best.  Responses may take awhile as my schedule
> makes it difficult to keep up with high volume mailing lists but if
> you cc: rsw@gnu.org, I'll likely see your message faster and respond.