Re: Subject: Call for testers for GNU Hyperbole 5.12, a large, useful Emacs package

[Robert Weiner]

On Sun, Jun 19, 2016 at 4:31 PM, Dmitry Gutov <address@hidden> wrote:

On 06/15/2016 04:41 AM, Robert Weiner wrote:

Use {C-h h d d} to display the Hyperbole DEMO, for a demonstration of
standard Hyperbole button capabilities.

This is a trick! It's not a demo, it's a tutorial. Or maybe really a manual, given it touches a lot of things but doesn't get to the "here's what you do to get X" quickly, where X is a thing the user knows and realizes they might want to do.

People really like to talk abstractly here, which is fun, but doesn't help move things forward too far when you could just as easily describe exactly what you mean.  Did you find the demo useful or not?  Did you like that it seemed more of a tutorial or not?  What are the things that you in particular wanted to know how to do that the demo did not explain or touch upon.  There is a 150 page manual with extensive cross-references for more detail but a few more sections are yet to be written.

A demo is when you expend minimal effort and mostly observe the niceties of a program/package/website/etc, in a condensed form.

Hyperbole is highly interactive, so we want people to interact with it.  We don't call it a tutorial because it doesn't seek to teach you how to use Hyperbole but only to experience some of its interesting features.

 

Some feedback:

- The buttons look like when I've seen of ACME. Neat, but didn't make me switch.

I don't know want ACME is.   But what would you be switching from?  How else can you interactively create buttons with elisp actions in Emacs?  Maybe org-mode does some of this?  Like org-mode, you need to spend more than hour or so with Hyperbole to see what it can do for you.  Just leave it loaded in your Emacs and experiment with it at times and read the manual as you have time.

- This doesn't work: "To display the top-level Hyperbole menu, click the Action Key anywhere within this paragraph or alternatively". It asks for the location of TAGS file instead.

Yes, one of the things still to be updated is the demo which has some old parts left to it.  This is coming soon.

 

- "Grep, Occurrence, Debugger and Compiler Error Buttons, and Cscope Analyzer Lines" for some reason describes the normal Emacs functionality?

Hyperbole recognizes these anywhere and doesn't need to parse the whole buffer, just the immediate line.

 

- "Depress the Action Key somewhere within this paragraph
and while holding it down, depress the Assist Key." doesn't lead to the desired effect, or maybe I just understand the instructions.

I will check.  There was a problem with this but I believe it was fixed in 5.12.  You need to be holding down shift-mouse2 and then press shift-mouse3 or vice versa to see help for the first key pressed.

Thanks for the initial feedback.

Bob