Hyperbole Implicit Buttons: Build your Hyperverse | Charlie Holland's Blog

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Hyperbole Implicit Buttons: Build your Hyperverse

Hyperbole Implicit Buttons: Build your Hyperverse

Table of Contents

1. TLDR

2. About &nbspemacs hyperbole implicitButtons

3. The Pitch &nbsphyperbole implicitButtons

4. Recognizers and Actions &nbsphyperbole hypertext

5. A Tour of the Built-ins &nbsphyperbole implicitButtons

6. What Will This Keypress Do? &nbspemacs hyperbole

7. The Cascade &nbsphyperbole implicitButtons

8. Buttons by Hand &nbsphyperbole implicitButtons

9. Create Your Own Button Types &nbsphyperbole elisp

9.1. defal: Define an Action Link

9.2. defil: Define an Implicit Link

9.3. defib: Define an Implicit Button

9.4. Closing Thoughts on Button Crafting

10. Try It &nbsphyperbole

11. Further Reading

1. TLDR

Your Emacs is full of markup-free hyperlinks embedded in your text, but<br>you're missing a way to utilize them. Think about a file path in a<br>README, a URL in an email, a commit 55a1f0 in a git log, or a function<br>call. All of these have a logical referent (a location or action), and<br>you likely have a good idea of what they should point to. GNU<br>Hyperbole's implicit buttons are pattern recognizers that identify<br>different hyperlink buttons in many Emacs contexts. Hyperbole's Action<br>Key (a single keybinding) then activates such buttons when it is<br>pressed. This post walks through the built-in recognizers, shows how to<br>ask Emacs "what will happen if I press the Action Key here?" (C-h<br>A), explains the cascade of Hyperbole's pattern recognizers that picks<br>the winning action, and demonstrates how to craft your own button types<br>with a one-liner (defal), a regular expression (defil), or the full<br>power of Lisp (defib).

2. About &nbspemacs hyperbole implicitButtons

This is the second post in my series on Hyperbole. The first post<br>introduced HyWiki, the zero-markup personal wiki, and showed that<br>Hyperbole has almost no adoption burden.

That post introduced implicit buttons in passing, because a HyWikiWord<br>is an implicit button. In this post I want to pay closer attention to<br>the concept, the capability, and the extension API, because the implicit<br>button is the mechanism that turns your information into a navigable,<br>actionable hyperverse.

3. The Pitch &nbsphyperbole implicitButtons

The text that Emacs displays and edits is already full of hyperlinks<br>that need to be brought to life. The mechanism to recognize and act on<br>these hyperlinks is exactly what GNU Hyperbole provides. Without<br>Hyperbole, these hyperlinks are inert. You probably have a good mental<br>model of what these links might be and what they point to, but you lack<br>a consistent, push-button reflex to act upon them.

Hyperbole's Implicit Buttons ship with a very large number of<br>recognizers for different types of hyperlinks that are already there in<br>your text, and allow you to act on them in place, without adding any<br>markup or reformatting the buffer. This freedom from markup is what<br>expands the reach of implicit buttons and makes them effective in<br>read-only buffers as well.

By design, Hyperbole is easy to adopt even if you're integrating<br>thousands of files into a well-used file system. With a few lines of<br>Elisp to install and configure Hyperbole, virtually everything you can<br>open with Emacs gets automatically hyperlinked; over 40 built-in<br>implicit button types (and an unbounded number of custom ones) propagate<br>transparently throughout your system.

In other words, Hyperbole brings your text to life!

4. Recognizers and Actions &nbsphyperbole hypertext

An explicit hyperlink requires markup and time to establish its link<br>to its referent. For example, an or an [[Org Link]]<br>requires something wrapped in delimiters so that some software knows<br>it is actionable. By contrast, an implicit button is recognized<br>solely from the text provided by the author via natural patterns such as<br>URLs, pathnames, key bindings, etc. Implicit buttons are ordinary<br>pieces of text that already carry their own meaning. Hyperbole author<br>Bob Weiner sums these up as "pattern recognizers across large text<br>corpuses".

(A quick note on terminology: Hyperbole also has its own explicit<br>buttons, which I will cover in a future post, but this post is entirely<br>about implicit buttons, which need no such creation step.)

Each implicit button type (ibtype) pairs two things, a recognizer<br>and an action type that are triggered with the press of the Action Key :

A recognizer is a predicate that inspects the text around point and<br>decides whether it matches the pattern.

Upon recognition, an action type is combined with parameters,<br>including any text matched by the recognizer, to form an action<br>that is fired.

John Wiegley, a longtime maintainer of GNU Emacs, frames the division this way1:

Hyperbole lifts some of the cognitive burden from...