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# # FILE: README # SUMMARY: Intro information on Hyperbole. # # AUTHOR: Bob Weiner # # ORIG-DATE: 19-Oct-91 at 03:27:47 # LAST-MOD: 3-Nov-95 at 23:20:31 by Bob Weiner The author's work on this project has been sponsored by Motorola Inc. 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. =========================================================================== * Table of Contents =========================================================================== * 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. Info Management: 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. Hypertext Outliner: an outliner with multi-level autonumbering and permanent ids attached to each outline node for use as hypertext link anchors, plus flexible view specifications that can be embedded within links or used interactively; 3. Button Types: A set of hyper-button 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. Programming Library: 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 V4.00 and V4.01? =========================================================================== (See "ChangeLog" for more complete details of changes.) ACTION AND ASSIST KEYS - New variable, action-key-url-function, sets the function used to display URLs which are activated as implicit buttons with the Action Key. - Action or Assist Key presses at the end of a line now scroll proportionally, by default. See the documentation for the variable, smart-scroll-proportional, and the Smart Scrolling section of the Hyperbole DEMO file, for more information. - Fixed bug that prevented browsing Info files in dired with the Action Key. BUTTON TYPES - "hsys-w3.el" is now automatically loaded so that the Action Key can follow URLs by default. It defines the implicit button type, www-url. - New implicit button type, text-toc, makes table of contents entries in README files jump to the associated section of the file. Try it with this file once you have loaded the current version of Hyperbole. DOCUMENTATION - A lot of work has gone into reorganizing and rewriting the Hyperbole manual to improve its readability and completeness. A full chapter on the Koutliner has been added. Please take some time to read the parts of interest to you and send your feedback on what is good and what is not to the mail list, <hyperbole@hub.ucsb.edu>. EMACS VERSIONS - MS-DOS and Windows NT Emacs 19 or Win-Emacs: Made Hyperbole work under all of these PC Emacs versions. - Emacs 19: Fixed bug that prevented Action Key selection of minibuffer menu items. - Emacs 19: Hyperbole menubar menus are now properly displayed. - Emacs 19: Action Key press on a filename that has a .info suffix displays the Top node for that info file in the Info browser. KOUTLINER - You can now view and edit koutlines with blank lines between cells turned off. {C-c b} now toggles between showing or hiding blank lines. - Minibuffer menu item Otl/Below renamed to Otl/Downto so could add Otl/Blanks which toggles blank lines on and off. - {C-c C-o} which displays one line per cell, for an overview, now also turns off blank lines. - {C-c C-i} adds an attribute to the current cell. It changes the attribute's value if it already exists. Completion on existing attribute names from the cell is provided. - {C-c h}, which displays cell attributes, when given "0" as the cell id now displays the zero cell's attributes in addition to any other attributes shown. - By default, the outliner separates labels from cell contents by two spaces. If you want to change the separator for the current outline, use {C-c M-l}. {C-u C-c M-l} will additionally change the default separator value used when new outlines are created. - If you invoke {M-x kotl-mode RET} on a non-read-only, non-koutline buffer, it converts each paragraph in the buffer into a level 1 cell, and thereby creates a koutline buffer. The conversion uses the buffer-specific variable, `paragraph-start' to determine the paragraphs in the buffer. - If you save a koutline to a file whose name does not end in .kotl, e.g. with {C-x C-w} (kfile:write), it will still be treated as a valid koutline when you read it in again. You can create a koutline file without the standard suffix via {M-x kfile:find RET} or by converting a buffer to a koutline via {M-x kotl-mode RET}. - Each koutline now maintains a current view setting that is saved with the outline and restored when it is first displayed. View settings include: show/hide blank lines, show a fixed number of lines per cell, show a fixed number of levels in the outline, show all lines and cells, show/hide ellipses after truncated outline entries, set cell numbering (label) types. - View settings are controlled by single character codes called view specs. The current view spec setting for a koutline appears in the modeline following the name of the outline. The current view spec setting may be changed interactively with {C-c C-v}. See <${hyperb:dir}/kotl/EXAMPLE.kotl, 2b16=048> for details on valid view specs. - Minibuffer menu item Otl/View changed to Otl/Vspec to set a view specification. Use {C-x C-r} to view a Koutline in read-only mode. - Added View menu to Koutliner popup and pulldown menus. Moved view-related tree operations from Tree menu to View menu. - Fixed importation of star outline and Augment-style files. - The elements of a another buffer or file may be inserted into a koutline as a set of cells by using the {C-x i} command. When prompted, you may use a buffer name or file name from which to insert. The cells will be inserted as the successors of the current cell unless {C-u C-x i} is used and then they are inserted as the initial children of the current cell. See the documentation for the variables, kimport:mode-alist and kimport:suffix-alist, for information on mode and suffix-specific conversions performed on files before they are inserted. Use {M-x kotl-mode:insert-file-contents RET} to insert the entire contents of a file into the current cell at the location of point. - {M-x kimport:file RET} will prompt for a file and a new koutline file to create and will insert the elements of the file in the new outline. (You can also use buffer or buffer names as arguments instead of file names.) See the documentation for the variables, kimport:mode-alist and kimport:suffix-alist, for information on how the importation type is determined. - {C-c +} appends the contents of one cell to the end of another. Added this as Append-Cell to popup and pulldown menus. - {M-w}, copy-region, now works properly in read-only outlines. ROLODEX - {e} within a rolodex match buffer edits the associated entry within your rolodex source file. Fixed bug that caused {e} to fail when entries are collapsed within the match buffer. - {C-h h r e}, rolo-edit, just displays your personal rolodex file if you hit {RET} without specifying an entry name to edit. - {m} within a rolodex match buffer composes mail to the e-mail address at point or the first address following point. Also added as Rolo/Mail minibuffer menu item and Rolodex/Mail-to-Address for window system menus. - New variable, wrolo-yank-reformat-function permits reformatting of an entry yanked into the current buffer with {C-h h r y}, rolo-yank. WINDOW CONFIGURATIONS - The minibuffer menu items, Win/PopRing and Win/YankRing now redisplay the Win menu after performing their actions. This allows you to yank or pop window configurations repeatedly until you get to the one you want. =========================================================================== * 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.xemacs.org in the /pub/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.xemacs.org (Internet Host ID = 128.174.252.16): prompt> ftp ftp.xemacs.org Login as 'anonymous' with your own <user-id>@<site-name> as a password. Name (ftp.xemacs.org): 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/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 =========================================================================== The following explains how to Use the Hyperbole "Makefile" to compile any needed code, to generate the "hsite.el" file used for site-specific Hyperbole customization, and to produce printable documentation. Edit the line near the top of "Makefile" that represents the emacs version that you use, so that it corresponds to the emacs executable name used on your system. Then immediatly below there, set the EMACS variable to the variable name for the emacs that you will use to compile the Hyperbole Lisp files. You may also have to set the SITE-PRELOADS variable defined further down in the file; follow the instructions that precede the `SITE-PRELOADS =' line. Make these changes now and save the Makefile. To install Hyperbole for use with InfoDock, XEmacs, GNU Emacs or Epoch, from a shell: cd <HYPERBOLE-DIR>; make All of the .elc compiled Lisp files are already built for XEmacs and V19, so this build will finish very quickly. If you really want to rebuild all of the .elc files, use: cd <HYPERBOLE-DIR>; make all-elc To produce the Postscript version of the Hyperbole manual: cd <HYPERBOLE-DIR>; make ps To install Hyperbole for use with GNU Emacs V18 or Epoch: cd <HYPERBOLE-DIR>; make all-elc-v18 This will produce a complete set of Emacs V18 .elc files. ---- The Hyperbole Manual is included in two forms: "man/hyperbole.info" - online version "man/hyperbole.texi" - source form 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 <HYPERBOLE-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 <HYPERBOLE-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:: GNU Emacs-based everyday information management system. Use {C-h h d d} for a demonstration. 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. ---- To set up so that all Emacs users have Hyperbole loaded for them, add the following lines to a site initialization file such as "site-start.el". Otherwise, each user will have to add these lines to his own "~/.emacs" initialization file. The following instructions use the term <HYPERBOLE-DIR>/ to refer to your hyperbole/ directory, so substitute your own value. To autoload Hyperbole so that it loads only when needed: (defvar hyperb:dir "<HYPERBOLE-DIR>/") "Directory where the Hyperbole executable code is kept. It must end with a directory separator character.") (load (expand-file-name "hversion" hyperb:dir)) (load (expand-file-name "hyperbole" hyperb:dir)) To fully load Hyperbole upon startup, add the additional line: (require 'hsite) That's all there is to the installation. ---- Once Hyperbole has been installed for use at your site, you can invoke it with {C-h h} or {M-x hyperbole RET} to bring up the Hyperbole main menu in the minibuffer window. =========================================================================== * 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', 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 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 mail 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 consider sending such a request to a Hyperbole mail list or people will wonder why you don't know that all Internet mail lists have a -request address for administrative requests. 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). There are two Hyperbole-related mail lists. Subscribe to one or the other, not to both. <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 minibuffer 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 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 RET} 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 Cheyenne Software, Inc. ------- I *love* koutlines. -- Bob Glickstein Z-Code Software Corporation ------- 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 rolodex 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 outliner, which I find a very useful tool. I've implemented Emacspeak extensions to support it. -- TV Raman Digital Cambridge Research Lab ------- 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 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 Cygnus Support ------- 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 Informix ------- 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 PIE Manager that provides services to PIE Tools. PIEmail, a mail reader is the only PIE Tool developed to date. 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, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 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 use it, redistribute it and/or modify it without fee 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 or XEmacs; see the file COPYING. If not, write to the Free Software Foundation, 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.