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# # FILE: README # SUMMARY: Intro information on Hyperbole. # # AUTHOR: Bob Weiner # ORG: Brown U. # # ORIG-DATE: 19-Oct-91 at 03:27:47 # LAST-MOD: 29-Aug-95 at 11:07:53 by Bob Weiner The author's work on this project has been sponsored by Motorola Inc. under the Distinguished Student-Employee program. We hope you enjoy using and developing with Hyperbole. Suggestions and bug reports are welcome, as described later in this document. Feel free to mail or post news containing this file wherever it may be of use. Outline ================================ * Hyperbole Overview * What's New? * How to Obtain * Installation / Configuration * Quick Reference * Mail Lists * User Quotes * Why was Hyperbole developed? * Copyright ================================ * Hyperbole Overview Hyperbole is an open, efficient, programmable information management and hypertext system. It is intended for everyday work on any UNIX platform supported by GNU Emacs. It works well with the versions of Emacs that support multiple X or NEXTSTEP windows: GNU Emacs V19, XEmacs (formerly called Lucid Emacs) and Epoch. Hyperbole allows hypertext buttons to be embedded within unstructured and structured files, mail messages and news articles. It offers intuitive mouse-based control of information display within multiple windows. It also provides point-and-click access to Info manuals, ftp archives, Wide-Area Information Servers (WAIS), and the World-Wide Web (WWW) hypertext system through encapsulations of software that support these protocols. Hyperbole consists of four parts: 1. an interactive information management interface, including a powerful rolodex, which anyone can use. It is easy to pick up and use since it introduces only a few new mechanisms and provides user-level facilities through a menu interface, which you control from the keyboard or the mouse; 2. an outliner with multi-level autonumbering and permanent ids attached to each outline node for use as hypertext link anchors; 3. A set of hyper-button-action types that provides core hypertext and other behaviors. Users can make simple changes to button types and those familiar with Emacs Lisp can quickly prototype and deliver new types; 4. a set of programming library classes for system developers who want to integrate Hyperbole with another user interface or as a back-end to a distinct system. (All of Hyperbole is written in Emacs Lisp for ease of modification. Although Hyperbole was initially designed as a prototype, it has been engineered for real-world usage and is well structured.) A Hyperbole user works with buttons; he may create, modify, move or delete buttons. Each button performs a specific action, such as linking to a file or executing a shell command. There are three categories of Hyperbole buttons: 1. explicit buttons - created by Hyperbole, accessible from within a single document; 2. global buttons - created by Hyperbole, accessible anywhere within a user's network of documents; 3. implicit buttons - buttons created and managed by other programs or embedded within the structure of a document, accessible from within a single document. Hyperbole recognizes implicit buttons by contextual patterns given in their type specifications. Hyperbole buttons may be clicked upon with a mouse to activate them or to describe their actions. Thus, a user can always check how a button will act before activating it. Buttons may also be activated from a keyboard. (In fact, virtually all Hyperbole operations, including menu usage, may be performed from any standard character terminal interface, so one need not be anchored to a workstation all day). Hyperbole does not enforce any particular hypertext or information management model, but instead allows you to organize your information in large or small chunks as you see fit. The Hyperbole outliner organizes information hierarchies which may also contain links to external information sources. Some of Hyperbole's most important features include: Buttons may link to information or may execute procedures, such as starting or communicating with external programs; One simply drags between a button source location and a link destination to create or to modify a link button. The same result can be achieved from the keyboard. Buttons may be embedded within electronic mail messages; Outlines allow rapid browsing, editing and movement of chunks of information organized into trees (hierarchies); Other hypertext and information retrieval systems may be encapsulated under a Hyperbole user interface (a number of samples are provided). Typical Hyperbole applications include: personal information management Overlapping link paths provide a variety of views into an information space. A search facility locates buttons in context and permits quick selection. documentation browsing Embed cross-references in your favorite documentation format. Add a point-and-click interface to existing documentation. Link code and design documents. Jump to the definition of an identifier from its use within code or its reference within documentation. brainstorming Capture ideas and then quickly reorganize them with the Hyperbole outliner. Link to related ideas, eliminating the need to copy and paste information into a single place. help/training systems Create tutorials with embedded buttons that show students how things work while explaining the concepts, e.g. an introduction to UNIX commands. This technique can be much more effective than descriptions alone. archive managers Supplement programs that manage archives from incoming information streams by having them add topic-based buttons that link to the archive holdings. Users can then search and create their own links to archive entries. * What's New in V3.19.03 through V3.19.07? (See "ChangeLog" for more complete details of changes.) ACTION AND ASSIST KEYS - Action clicks on Fortran variables now jump to their definitions if an appropriate TAGS table has been built for the Fortran source code. BUTTONS - New patch-msg implicit button type jumps to the source line associated with output lines from the 'patch' program that begin with "Hunk" or "Patching". - Grep-msg implicib button type now jumps to source lines associated with Perl5 error messages. - Local world-wide-web file references of the form, file://localhost/ are now treated by Hyperbole as implicit pathname buttons and displayed as any other local file reference. - Improved recognition of URLs. EMACS VERSIONS - Setting hproperty:but-emphasize-p under Emacs 19 now highlights explicit buttons when the mouse moves over them. This feature already existed for InfoDock and XEmacs. KOUTLINER - Added new outliner menu commands for InfoDock, XEmacs and Emacs 19: Hide-Levels, Hide-Subtree, and Show-Subtree. - Added 'Below' (same as {C-x $}) and 'Kill' (same as {C-c C-k}) menu items to Outliner minibuffer menu. - Enabled Copy-Before-Cell and Copy-After-Cell menu items. - {C-x $} prompts you for an outline level and hides any cells in the outline below that level. - {C-M-h} hides a subtree, ignoring the root cell. {M-x kotl-mode:show-subtree RET} is its inverse. - {M-s} now centers a line in the outliner. {M-S} centers a paragraph. - Fixed problem that could leave internal outliner data exposed when a new final cell was added to an outline. MISCELLANEOUS - "Hyperbole mail buttons accepted" messages now appear in your outgoing mail only if you have loaded the full Hyperbole system. - Fixed a few minor bugs. * How to Obtain Hyperbole is actually part of an integrated tool framework that we have developed called InfoDock. InfoDock provides a modern user interface on top of Emacs, information management, and powerful software development tools, all in one package. Get it via anonymous ftp from host ftp.cs.uiuc.edu in the /pub/xemacs/infodock directory. Hyperbole is also available as a standalone package via anonymous ftp across the Internet. Do not send requests to have it mailed to you since it won't be. Instead have another party who has Internet access obtain it for the both of you. Here is how to obtain Hyperbole as a standalone package on the Internet: Move to a directory below which you want the 'hyperbole' directory to be created. Unpacking the Hyperbole archive will create this directory and place all of the files below it. cd <LOCAL-LISP-DIR> Ftp to ftp.cs.uiuc.edu (Internet Host ID = 128.174.252.1): prompt> ftp ftp.cs.uiuc.edu Login as 'anonymous' with your own <user-id>@<site-name> as a password. Name (ftp.cs.uiuc.edu): anonymous 331 Guest login ok, send EMAIL address (e.g. user@host.domain) as password. Password: 230 Guest login ok, access restrictions apply. Move to the Hyperbole directory: ftp> cd pub/xemacs/infodock Set your transfer mode to binary: ftp> bin 200 Type set to I. Turn off prompting: ftp> prompt Interactive mode off. Retrieve just the Hyperbole archive and any diff-based patches (there may not be any patches): ftp> mget hyperbole* Close the ftp connection: ftp> quit 221 Goodbye. Unpack the tar archive using the GNU version of the 'zcat' program: zcat h*tar.gz | tar xvf - or gunzip h*tar.gz; tar xvf h*tar Apply any patches you retrieved, also: cd hyperbole; patch < <patch-file> * Installation / Configuration Edit the lines near the top of "Makefile" that set the actual executable to use to compile the Hyperbole Lisp files. Then choose one of the Emacs version settings and set the EMACS variable to it. You may also have to set SITE-PRELOADS; follow the instructions that precede the 'SITE-PRELOADS =' line. Make these changes now and save the Makefile. The following instructions use the term <HYP-DIR> to refer to the directory in which you placed Hyperbole, so substitute your own value. To install Hyperbole for use with XEmacs or GNU Emacs V19, from a shell: cd <HYP-DIR>; make All of the .elc compiled Lisp files are already built for V19, so this build will finish very quickly. If you really want to rebuild all of the .elc files under Emacs V19, use: cd <HYP-DIR>; make all-elc To produce the Postscript version of the Hyperbole manual: cd <HYP-DIR>; make ps To install Hyperbole for use with GNU Emacs V18 or Epoch, you must first arrange for the Lisp variable `hyperb:dir' to be set to the full directory path where you have placed Hyperbole. It must be set before Hyperbole is loaded into an Emacs session, e.g. in an Emacs initialization file add: (setq hyperb:dir "<HYP-DIR>/") (load (expand-file-name "hyperbole" hyperb:dir)) Then from a shell: cd <HYP-DIR> make all-elc-v18 This will produce a complete set of Emacs V18 .elc files. ---- (Note that the section on 'Initializing' in the Hyperbole Manual duplicates the information given below on how to load Hyperbole for use. That section is more extensive, however.) To set up so that all Emacs users have Hyperbole loaded for them, make the following changes in "lisp/default.el". Otherwise, each user will have to add these lines to his own "~/.emacs" initialization file. To autoload Hyperbole so that it is only loaded when needed: (load "<HYP-DIR>/hversion") (load "<HYP-DIR>/hyperbole") Alternatively, if you want Hyperbole to always completely load upon startup, add the following lines instead: (load "<HYP-DIR>/hversion") (load "<HYP-DIR>/hyperbole") (require 'hsite) That's all there is to the installation. ---- The Hyperbole Manual is included in two forms: "man/hyperbole.info" - online version "man/hyperbole.texi" - source form Once Hyperbole has been installed for use at your site, you can manually invoke it from within GNU Emacs or Epoch by loading the "hyperbole.el" code library file: {M-x load-lib RTN hyperbole RTN}. {C-h h} or {M-x hyperbole RTN} then brings up the Hyperbole main menu. To add pointers to the Info version of the Hyperbole manual within your Info directory, follow these instructions. If 'Info-directory-list' is bound as a variable within your Emacs, you can simply set it so that <HYP-DIR> is an element in the list. Otherwise, from a shell, cd to the directory given by your 'Info-directory' variable and execute the following command: (rm hyperbole.info*; cp <HYP-DIR>/man/hyperbole.info* .) Then add an Info menu entry for the Hyperbole manual in your Info "dir" file: (the '*' should be placed in the first column of the file): * Hyperbole: (hyperbole.info). GNU Emacs-based everyday information management system. Use {C-h h d d} for a demo. Includes context-sensitive mouse and keyboard support, a powerful rolodex, an autonumbered outliner with hyperlink anchors for each outline cell, and extensible hypertext facilities including hyper-links in mail and news messages. * Quick Reference "MANIFEST" summarizes most of the files in the distribution. See "DEMO" for a demonstration of standard Hyperbole button capabilities. Naming conventions: All Hyperbole-specific code files begin with an 'h'. 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 handling presently implemented by Hyperbole. "hmail.el" provides a basic abstract interface for folding mail readers other than Rmail into Hyperbole. See the "(hyperbole.info)Questions and Answers" appendix in the Hyperbole manual for information on how to alter the default context-sensitive Hyperbole key bindings. * Mail Lists There are several Hyperbole-related mail addresses. Learn what each is for before you contemplate mailing to any of them. hyperbole-request@hub.ucsb.edu hyperbole-announce-request@hub.ucsb.edu ALL mail concerning administration of the Hyperbole mailing lists should be sent to the appropriate one of these addresses. That includes addition, change, or deletion requests. Don't EVER consider sending such a request to a Hyperbole mail list or people will think you can't read. Use the following formats on your subject line to execute requests, where you substitute your own values for the <> delimited items. Subject: Subscribe '<' <user@domain> '>' (<your name>). Subject: Unsubscribe '<' <user@domain> '>'. To change your address, you must unsubscribe your old address in one message and then subscribe your new address in another message. For example: To: hyperbole-announce-request@hub.ucsb.edu Subject: Unsubscribe <joe@any.com>. To: hyperbole-announce-request@hub.ucsb.edu Subject: Subscribe <joe@any.com> (Joe Williams). hyperbole@hub.ucsb.edu Mail list for discussion of all Hyperbole issues. Bug reports and suggestions may also be sent here. Always use your Subject and/or Summary: lines to state the position that your message takes on the topic that it addresses, e.g. send "Subject: Basic bug in top-level Hyperbole menu." rather than "Subject: Hyperbole bug". Statements end with periods, questions with question marks (typically), and high energy, high impact declarations with exclamation points. This simple rule makes all e-mail communication much easier for recipients to handle appropriately. If you ask a question, your subject line should include the word 'question' or 'query' or should end with a '?', e.g. "Subject: How can man page SEE ALSOs be made implicit buttons?" A "Subject: Re: How can ..." then indicates an answer to the question. Question messages should normally include your Hyperbole and Emacs version numbers and clearly explain your problem and surrounding issues. Otherwise, you will simply waste the time of those who may want to help you. (Your top-level Hyperbole menu shows its version number and {M-x emacs-version RTN} gives the other.) If you ask questions, you should consider adding to the discussion by telling people the kinds of work you are doing or contemplating doing with Hyperbole. In this way, the list will not be overwhelmed by messages that ask for, but provide no information. hyperbole-announce@hub.ucsb.edu Those who don't want to participate in the discussion but want to hear about bug fixes and new releases of Hyperbole should subscribe to this list. Anyone on the 'hyperbole' list is automatically on this one too, so there is no need to subscribe to this one in that case. This list is for official fixes and announcements so don't send your own fixes here. Send them to 'hyperbole' instead. * User Quotes *** MAN I love Hyperbole!!! Wow! *** -- Ken Olstad ------- I *love* koutlines. -- Bob Glickstein ------- "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 potentials 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 Epoch-based 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 ------- "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 ------- I just wanted to say how much I enjoy using the Hyperbole outliner. 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 ------- The Hyperbole system provides a nice interface to exploring corners of Unix that I didn't know existed before. -- Craig Smith ------- * Why was Hyperbole developed? Hyperbole has been designed to aid in research aimed at Personalized Information production/retrieval Environments (PIEs). Hyperbole is a backend manager to be used in prototyping an initial PIE. 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. * Copyright The following copyright applies to the Hyperbole system as a whole. Copyright (C) 1989-1995, Free Software Foundation, Inc. Available for use and distribution under the terms of the GNU Public License, version 2 or higher. Hyperbole is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option) any later version. Hyperbole is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with GNU Emacs; see the file COPYING. If not, write to the Free Software Foundation, 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.