Emacs carnival: Obscure Packages

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In September I am lucky enough to host another Emacs Carnival entry, and we are talking about Obscure Packages.

In case you know a very useful or funny package that nobody else knows about (or it is too hard to use), don't hesitate to write a couple of words about it in a blogpost. It could be a new and not-yet-popular package or mature and forgotten one.

Links to Carnival entries are welcome via my email.

My entry: GNU Hyperbole

It is both very old (first release was in 1991) and seems pretty obscure (:

It is hard to call GNU Hyperbole just a package. It is a fully functional tool suite - here's what you have:

  • Interactive buttons that you can create and use in any major mode
  • Window and frame management
  • Contact (or any other hierarchical, record-oriented information) management
  • An outliner for structured document creation
  • Various shortcuts for a wide variety of actions: web search, grep and find

The main thing about Hyperbole is that it can be very hard to understand just by reading the documentation. Although pretty detailed, it doesn't provide enough examples on use cases, so for some people (and for me), it seems overly complicated at first. Also, it has a kind of mysterios reputation, as seen in the following Reddit posts.

For example, the post "GNU Hyperbole: many have heard of it, but what does it do? This is my answer" has the following reply: 

Number one problem BY FAR for Hyperbole IMHO is communication, and this blog post fails in the same way; almost every preesentation or blog post etc goes into a wall of text (no pics), and/or into long description beating around the bush with all kinds of flowery crap, without actually giving a short catchy 'heres what this will do for you', which is REALLY WEIRD.

So despite my usual way of learning new packages with written documentation, in this case, I advise you to start with the couple of videos recored by Hyperbole authors.

You could begin with the introduction to buttons video (as the most useful thing from my perspective). And if you are brave enough (and have plenty of time), you could watch the long overview of all Hyperbole's rich functionality.

And here I will share a quick example how I use it.

With Hyperbole you can write the following construction in any buffer: 

<yt-play "WKwZHSbHmPg" "12:26">

And when you press Meta + Return, you will have the video opened in a browser with the specified timecode. What a magic trick!