Introduction

This guide teaches you how to use presenterm. At this point you should have already installed presenterm, otherwise visit the installation guide to get started.

Quick start

Download the demo presentation and run it using:

git clone https://github.com/mfontanini/presenterm.git
cd presenterm
presenterm examples/demo.md

Presentations

A presentation in presenterm is a single markdown file. Every slide in the presentation file is delimited by a line that contains a single HTML comment:

<!-- end_slide -->

Presentations can contain most commonly used markdown elements such as ordered and unordered lists, headings, formatted text (bold, italics, strikethrough, inline code, etc), code blocks, block quotes, tables, etc.

Introduction slide

By setting a front matter at the beginning of your presentation, you can configure the title, sub title, and author of your presentation and implicitly create an introduction slide:

---
title: My first presentation
sub_title: (in presenterm!)
author: Myself
---

All of these attributes are optional so you're not forced to set them all.

Multiple authors

If you're creating a presentation in which there's multiple authors, you can use the authors key instead of author and list them all this way:

---
title: Our first presentation
authors:
  - Me
  - You
---

Slide titles

Any setext header will be considered to be a slide title and will be rendered in a more slide-title-looking way. By default this means it will be centered, some vertical padding will be added and the text color will be different.

Hello
===

Ending slides

While other applications use a thematic break (---) to mark the end of a slide, presenterm uses a special end_slide HTML comment:

<!-- end_slide -->

This makes the end of a slide more explicit and easy to spot while you're editing your presentation. See the configuration if you want to customize this behavior.

If you really would prefer to use thematic breaks (---) to delimit slides, you can do that by enabling the end_slide_shorthand options.

Colored text

span HTML tags can be used to provide foreground and/or background colors to text. Currently only the style attribute is supported, and only the CSS attributes color and background-color can be used to set the foreground and background colors respectively. Colors used in both CSS attributes can refer to theme palette colors by using the palette:<name> or p:<name syntaxes.

For example, the following will use ff0000 as the foreground color and whatever the active theme's palette defines as foo:

<span style="color: #ff0000; background-color: palette:foo">colored text!</span>

Key bindings

Navigation within a presentation should be intuitive: jumping to the next/previous slide can be done by using the arrow keys, hjkl, and page up/down keys.

Besides this:

• Jumping to the first slide: gg.
• Jumping to the last slide: G.
• Jumping to a specific slide: <slide-number>G.
• Exit the presentation: <ctrl>c.

You can check all the configured keybindings by pressing ? while running presenterm.

Configuring key bindings

If you don't like the default key bindings, you can override them in the configuration file.

Modals

presenterm currently has 2 modals that can provide some information while running the application. Modals can be toggled using some key combination and can be hidden using the escape key by default, but these can be configured via the configuration file key bindings.

Slide index modal

This modal can be toggled by default using control+p and lets you see an index that contains a row for every slide in the presentation, including its title and slide index. This allows you to find a slide you're trying to jump to quicklier rather than scanning through each of them.

Key bindings modal

The key bindings modal displays the key bindings for each of the supported actions and can be opened by pressing ?.

Hot reload

Unless you run in presentation mode by passing in the --present parameter, presenterm will automatically reload your presentation file every time you save it. presenterm will also automatically detect which specific slide was modified and jump to it so you don't have to be jumping back and forth between the source markdown and the presentation to see how the changes look like.