[HN Gopher] Presenterm: Markdown Slideshows in the Terminal
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Presenterm: Markdown Slideshows in the Terminal
Author : pea-tear
Score : 274 points
Date : 2025-03-08 21:36 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| enriquto wrote:
| I wonder how are the large fonts rendered. Are they sixel images
| or what?
| pea-tear wrote:
| See the sibling comment. This is a new protocol that the kitty
| maintainer created and is supported as of kitty 0.40.0, which
| was just released yesterday. This makes presentations look much
| more presentation-like now!
| mmastrac wrote:
| I was curious how the larger fonts worked in Kitty -- here's the
| reference for the protocol:
|
| https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/text-sizing-protocol/
| kelvie wrote:
| Thanks, I was also wondering! I wonder what it would take
| (politically) to get Konsole to support this (kind of afraid to
| just file the bug and find out!)
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| VTE based terminals can't support this AFAIK. Kitty draws
| itself with OpenGL and so supports these things. Iterm2 is
| also a similar story afaik (and Wezterm and ....)
| naikrovek wrote:
| Xterm does this via DEC protocol commands. Well, it does this
| by specifying double-height, double width, or both. Why does
| Kitty have to do things its own way yet again?
| edoceo wrote:
| Maybe cause TTY things are crazy! That mechanism of the
| computer world is so full of arcane/legacy/defacto
| "standards"
|
| But how to overhaul? WaylandTYU?
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Even the old VT220 had large fonts. They were just not used by
| most applications
| campbel wrote:
| Alternative https://maaslalani.com/slides/
| bryanhogan wrote:
| What is the benfit of doing this in the terminal over tools such
| as Slidev or Marp which also allow you to make slides based on
| Markdown?
|
| - Slidev: https://sli.dev/
|
| - Marp: https://marp.app/
| riffic wrote:
| marp is rad! kill powerpoint forever by writing markdown
| slides.
| fgarit wrote:
| Lots of people want to demo things on the terminal, having your
| slides in the terminal as well makes things seamless. Also some
| people just like using terminals for all things.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Are either of these related to s5? What's wild is that I've
| been using zim-wiki -> html -> s5 slides for years, and still
| do, and I've completely forgotten "how s5 works?" It's just so
| easy to do things that way over markdown.
| okonomiyaki3000 wrote:
| I've used both of these a lot, Marp being really easy to get
| started with and Slidev being a little more complex but well
| worth the (minor) effort. To me, presenterm doesn't appear to
| offer any compelling features compared with these.
| andatki wrote:
| I've used Marp a lot and it's great. Column layouts and code
| highlighting are two features Presenterm offers that I don't
| think are available in Marp.
| WD-42 wrote:
| I used Presenterm for a work presentation recently. Being able
| to seamlessly transition from slides to example code in Vim is
| really, really nice. No need to jungle multiple windows, just
| terminal tabs or even ctrl+z/fg. Plus it looks really cool.
| closewith wrote:
| I wonder what the audience thought - apart from the cool
| factor.
| lloeki wrote:
| The other day I had to conjure a presentation in short order.
|
| I had a few code examples to massage out of a codebase, so I
| fired up vim to make them simpler/clearer before I'd put them
| in Keynote.
|
| Then I started taking a few notes in a scratch buffer. After
| a few moments I began to dread having to move that content
| over and format in the UI and all.
|
| ... And then it dawned on me that I could just use _vim
| itself_ as the presentation tool!
|
| - one tab per slide, one file per tab
|
| - gt/gT (:tabnext :tabprev) to move through
|
| - ,z (junegunn/goyo :Goyo) for a "hudless" display
|
| - splits and :terminal on live demo time
|
| - ,b (junegunn/fzf.vim :Buffers) to jump to any "slide" on
| question time (just name files appropriately)
|
| - prepare the whole thing and save session with :mksession
| bazzargh wrote:
| I made a terminal based presentation tool some years back and
| like sibling comments said, it was neat for switching back and
| forth to code samples and output.
|
| Mine wasn't markdown tho: I used ttyrec to record a terminal
| session to a file per slide and the tool just played it back. I
| set it up so pressing most keys would advance the playback
| hackertyper style, advancing 200ms per keypress IIRC. When you
| reach the end of a slide, press return for the next one. The
| back and forward arrows were used to jump between slides
| quickly, and title text was done with figlet.
|
| I only used it for a couple of in house presentations and
| meetups where the hacker styling was appropriate; there wasn't
| much to it so the code wasn't released, it'd be easy to
| recreate.
|
| edited to add: I forgot, I did put it in a gist.
| https://gist.github.com/bazzargh/a267b97a52f7a1f70c46 ymmv. I
| recall the playback struggled with things like vim, I always
| meant to try integrating as cinema since it seems to work
| better
| banku_brougham wrote:
| this looks amazing, goodbye google docs
| fitsumbelay wrote:
| very cool +1 for terminal slides
| James_K wrote:
| Turning the terminal into a worse web browser is such a silly
| decision. I really wish we had better environments for this
| stuff. Something like MatLab. I suppose achieving such a thing on
| the ubiquity of the UNIX text streams model would be immensely
| difficult.
| xyst wrote:
| brb re-creating pitch deck with presenterm to take presenterm
| from OSS to closed/limited/business source licensed software (ie,
| hashicorp strategy) then IPO.
|
| Then rug pull the stonk. Leave retail holding the bag, go on
| permanent leave, get a golden parachute, then some cookie cutter
| MBA scumbag takes over and ruins it further. Subsequently gets
| sold to big tech for pennies, and IP gets shelved.
|
| In the meanwhile, FOSS community forks presenterm and a
| divergence occurs.
|
| The rinse and repeat :). The circle of scamming.
| ChilledTonic wrote:
| Phenomenal - I've been using patat for this:
|
| https://github.com/jaspervdj/patat
|
| This has in line snippet execution, critical for how I present -
| so lets switch to this.
| rellik wrote:
| Very cool! I see the comments about Kitty. Any other terminals
| well supported?
| pea-tear wrote:
| iterm2 and wezterm are well supported as well!
| yoshuaw wrote:
| I wonder what the first incarnation of single-page markdown files
| for slides has been. The earliest I know of is `tslide` by
| Dominic Tarr, first published in 2012:
| https://github.com/tslide/tslide
| rickbyke wrote:
| Vroom goes back to 2008. It generates slides within vim, and it
| has a wiki syntax, not markdown.
| https://github.com/ingydotnet/vroom-pm
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| This looks just so so good. Perfect for my usecase (making
| presentations for our lab meetings)
|
| Gonna try and convert a few of my old ones to presenterm. I'll
| let you know how it goes.
| hknws2023saio wrote:
| I love this, what a wonderful idea
| mycall wrote:
| Any chance of adding mermaid syntax for ANSI or ASCII charts?
| pea-tear wrote:
| Mermaid is already supported natively, meaning the mermaid
| diagram output is rendered as actual images; no need for ascii
| diagrams
| https://mfontanini.github.io/presenterm/features/code/mermai...
| tombert wrote:
| I'm giving a talk in June, and it might be fun to do it entirely
| in the terminal.
|
| Historically, I've done the slides with Markdown and rendered
| them to Beamer with Pandoc, and that works well enough, though
| slightly awkward with transitions. I might get more nerd-cred if
| I live in the terminal.
|
| I'll need to check this one out.
| anta40 wrote:
| Ahh very cool. Guess I can say goodbye to Power
| Point/Keynote/etc.
| vednig wrote:
| https://termui.sh
| bravetraveler wrote:
| With this, I'm going to get the executives living in the shell as
| much as I do
| phrotoma wrote:
| I've been creating slides with markdown and revealjs for my day
| job as an instructor for several years. I've also used obsidian
| and quarto for markdown->slide creation for a handful of meetups
| / conferences. This month I tried writing a kubecon talk using
| presenterm and had to throw in the towl after a couple hours of
| struggling.
|
| It's super cool and I want to love it, but I find it too fiddly
| to get the layout the way I want it. For me it might be easier to
| just page through a plain text file of ascii art style diagrams
| or something.
|
| I've always been just absolutely dog shit at design stuff. I
| can't center a div to save my life and I don't understand
| columns. I need it to be absolutely idiot proof because I'm an
| absolute idiot when it comes to these things.
|
| I guess this is my attempt at encouragement for folks to keep
| working on these tools because I love the aesthetic but I just
| can't grok the interface. I will continue to watch this project
| with interest!
| pea-tear wrote:
| I would love to hear specifics on how you couldn't get the
| layout looking how you wanted it to. e.g. do you have a link to
| the presentation you did? Feel free to shot me an email at
| gmail, it's easily findeable online.
| bartvk wrote:
| Speaker notes seem to need an extra step; start an additional
| terminal on the laptop screen (not the presented screen), then
| start the speaker notes instance via a terminal command.
| PowerPoint understands the difference between your own laptop
| screen and the external output.
|
| Still, good that they thought of including speaker notes, plus
| this is more flexible in combination with ssh.
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(page generated 2025-03-09 22:00 UTC)