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[[!meta title="Hyperbole, My Dear Watson"]]
[[!meta copyright="Copyright © 2026 Charlie Holland"]]
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# Hyperbole, My Dear Watson
Charlie Holland (he/him/his) - <https://chiply.dev>, <https://github.com/chiply>, <https://reddit.com/u/misterchiply>, <mailto:mister.chiply@gmail.com>
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In the talk, I want to build the same set of notes twice, once in plain Org
and once in Org + GNU Hyperbole, and this talk will demonstrate the utility
of adding Hyperbole to the typical org workflow. The subject matter (the
thing I'm taking notes on in the demo) is the Sherlock Holmes canon, which
I selected deliberately as it contains sixty public-domain stories, on
Project Gutenberg as plain text. This avoids copyright issues and also
allows users to follow along with a note taking workflow on a complex
resource for free.
The thesis is that Org simply 'reads' text, while Hyperbole's added value
is that it 'recognizes' text. In Org, a link is markup you have to
explicitly type into a document, whereas in Hyperbole it is a pattern
already in the text you read or type, and becomes live in any buffer (org,
markdown, eww, epud, etc…).
My contrived note taking on the Sherlock canon will make the benefits of
Hyperbole clear.
- In my notes, concepts and character names will be noted as CamelCase
WikiWords. Once created, these will show up highlighted in any EPUB file,
EWW page, etc….
- HyWiki links these for free in my personal notes, but in Doyle's text
they are not written in CamelCase, so a simple alias extension to
Hyperbole's HyWiki makes it as so that "Sherlock Holmes" will show up as a
match for the "SherlockHolmes" WikiWord in any buffer, which will serve as
an extensibility demo that resolves a common pain point with HyWiki.
- Other elements of the canon are WikiWords already in-place. Sherlockians
have cited the stories by four-letter code since 1947, so I will define a
button with `defil` that makes every "(SCAN)", for a example, a live
citation.
- The Gutenberg text must stay untouched, so annotations I create will live
in an explicit-button file beside it.
- Holmes's docketed index of "men and things" will be an additional demo
for HyRolo.
Act I shows four frictions with Org alone, and Act II removes them one
Hyperbole mechanism at a time. I close with what Org does better, which
alternatives to Hyperbole address each friction (org-roam, org-remark,
denote, org-transclusion), and why Hyperbole's uniform mechanism over all
text in every buffer is still a differentiator. The idea is that I'm
promoting Org plus Hyperbole, not Org versus Hyperbole.
About the speaker:
Charlie Holland writes
about Emacs and knowledge management at [chiply.dev](https://chiply.dev), where this talk caps a
four-part series on GNU Hyperbole. Charlie builds the same notes on the
Sherlock Holmes canon twice, in Org and then in Org plus Hyperbole, to show
the value that a mature hypertext system can bring to your note taking
workflow.
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