What does GNU Hyperbole do?

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2022-06-21 20:30:05

GNU Hyperbole is one of the more well-established Emacs software packages out there, originating in the early 1990s, and has been on ELPA from the very beginning. Every so often, I find someone on the Internet who has stumbled upon the Hyperbole package, has read some of the documentation, and felt the need to ask the question, what exactly does Hyperbole do? The simplest possible explanation is that Hyperbole is a personalized information management system customizable with the full power of Emacs. But this explanation is usually less than satisfying, possibly because Emacs already has a number of built-in major and minor modes that can help to manage your personal information, so it begs the questions: how is Hyperbole different, what useful features does it add? I'll attempt to answer that question.

Hyperbole augments the already very powerful textual user interface (TUI) that is built-in to Emacs with the most useful aspects of a graphical user interface (GUI) in a very non-invasive way. The rest of this article explains the Hyperbole user experience, and recommends a simple but useful workflow that you can use to get started with it.