Get curious about the Hyperbole prompt

Have you seen the Hyperbole prompt (C-h h)? It's somewhat baroque or at least terse. I associate the style with "classic" packages such as ido—it just takes one line in the minibuffer:

Hy7.1.3>   Act   Butfile/   Cust/   Doc/   Ebut/   Find/   Gbut/   Hist   Ibut/   Kotl/   Msg/   Rolo/   Screen/   Win/

Now there's two ways you could react to seeing this.

Panic. Don't understand. Quit for now, to pick it up later (probably never).

Or—

Huh. Lots of concepts I've never seen before! What could they mean? What the hell is Ebut? Ibut? Rolo? Someone must've thought they're worth the space they take in this tight prompt – soon the secrets will be mine! C-h i d m hyperbole RET

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Once in the manual, us youth zoom past things too much. Look at the introduction. This software was first copyrighted in 1989! That predates Fallout 2. The Berlin Wall stood, and there was no Web—even Netscape Navigator lay in the future.

If not all manuals, then at least this manual should be treated like sitting down to watch a good movie. You know that contentedness when everything is ready, you have your hand in a fresh batch of popcorn—

—don't immediately go about filtering for the relevant—

—you don't know what info you need so how should you filter anyway—

—take it slow. Relax your shoulders. Enjoy the intro, the license statement, the acknowledgements. The part about dead mentors who inspired the devs. The part about dedicating KOutliner to Bob Weiner's wife Kathy.

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This way of reading an #emacs manual… You don't need to be here, learning any of this in the first place. Why not treat it as the leisure it is and enjoy every step?

If you were watching a movie and got stressed, wanted to skip ahead, the people I know would say you'd better just turn off the movie – it isn't doing for you what it's supposed to do. Same situation here. If you feel the need to skip ahead in a manual, you may as well skip away from the laptop instead.