Configuration

presenterm allows you to customize its behavior via a configuration file. This file is stored, along with all of your custom themes, in the following directories:

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/presenterm/ if that environment variable is defined, otherwise:
~/.config/presenterm/ in Linux.
~/Library/Application Support/presenterm/ in macOS.
~/AppData/Roaming/presenterm/config/ in Windows.

The configuration file will be looked up automatically in the directories above under the name config.yaml. e.g. on Linux you should create it under ~/.config/presenterm/config.yaml. You can also specify a custom path to this file when running presenterm via the --config-path parameter.

A sample configuration file is provided in the repository that you can use as a base.

Options

Options are special configuration parameters that can be set either in the configuration file under the options key, or in a presentation's front matter under the same key. This last one allows you to customize a single presentation so that it acts in a particular way. This can also be useful if you'd like to share the source files for your presentation with other people.

The supported configuration options are currently the following:

implicit_slide_ends

This option removes the need to use  in between slides and instead assumes that if you use a slide title, then you're implying that the previous slide ended. For example, the following presentation:

---
options:
  implicit_slide_ends: true
---

Tasty vegetables
================

* Potato

Awful vegetables
================

* Lettuce

Is equivalent to this "vanilla" one that doesn't use implicit slide ends.

Tasty vegetables
================

* Potato

<!-- end_slide -->

Awful vegetables
================

* Lettuce

end_slide_shorthand

This option allows using thematic breaks (---) as a delimiter between slides. When enabling this option, you can still use  but any thematic break will also be considered a slide terminator.

---
options:
  end_slide_shorthand: true
---

this is a slide

---------------------

this is another slide

command_prefix

Because presenterm uses HTML comments to represent commands, it is necessary to make some assumptions on what is a command and what isn't. The current heuristic is:

If an HTML comment is laid out on a single line, it is assumed to be a command. This means if you want to use a real HTML comment like , this will raise an error.
If an HTML comment is multi-line, then it is assumed to be a comment and it can have anything inside it. This means you can't have a multi-line comment that contains a command like pause inside.

Depending on how you use HTML comments personally, this may be limiting to you: you cannot use any single line comments that are not commands. To get around this, the command_prefix option lets you configure a prefix that must be set in all commands for them to be configured as such. Any single line comment that doesn't start with this prefix will not be considered a command.

For example:

---
options:
  command_prefix: "cmd:"
---

<!-- remember to say "potato here" -->

Tasty vegetables
================

* Potato

<!-- cmd:pause -->

**That's it!**

In the example above, the first comment is ignored because it doesn't start with "cmd:" and the second one is processed because it does.

incremental_lists

If you'd like all bullet points in all lists to show up with pauses in between you can enable the incremental_lists option:

---
options:
  incremental_lists: true
---

* pauses
* in
* between

Keep in mind if you only want specific bullet points to show up with pauses in between, you can use the incremental_lists comment command.

strict_front_matter_parsing

This option tells presenterm you don't care about extra parameters in presentation's front matter. This can be useful if you're trying to load a presentation made for another tool. The following presentation would only be successfully loaded if you set strict_front_matter_parsing to false in your configuration file:

---
potato: 42
---

# Hi

image_attributes_prefix

The image size prefix (by default image:) can be configured to be anything you would want in case you don't like the default one. For example, if you'd like to set the image size by simply doing ![width:50%](path.png) you would need to set:

---
options:
  image_attributes_prefix: ""
---

![width:50%](path.png)

Defaults

Defaults can only be configured via the configuration file.

Default theme

The default theme can be configured only via the config file. When this is set, every presentation that doesn't set a theme explicitly will use this one:

defaults:
  theme: light

Terminal font size

This is a parameter that lets you explicitly set the terminal font size in use. This should not be used unless you are in Windows, given there's no (easy) way to get the terminal window size so we use this to figure out how large the window is and resize images properly. Some terminals on other platforms may also have this issue, but that should not be as common.

If you are on Windows or you notice images show up larger/smaller than they should, you can adjust this setting in your config file:

defaults:
  terminal_font_size: 16

Preferred image protocol

By default presenterm will try to detect which image protocol to use based on the terminal you are using. In some cases this may fail, for example when using tmux. In those cases, you can explicitly set this via the --image-protocol parameter or the configuration key defaults.image_protocol:

defaults:
  image_protocol: kitty-local

Possible values are:

auto: try to detect it automatically (default).
kitty-local: use the kitty protocol in "local" mode, meaning both presenterm and the terminal run in the same host and can share the filesystem to communicate.
kitty-remote: use the kitty protocol in "remote" mode, meaning presenterm and the terminal run in different hosts and therefore can only communicate via terminal escape codes.
iterm2: use the iterm2 protocol.
sixel: use the sixel protocol. Note that this requires compiling presenterm using the --features sixel flag.

Key bindings

Key bindings that presenterm uses can be manually configured in the config file via the bindings key. The following is the default configuration:

bindings:
  # the keys that cause the presentation to move forwards.
  next: ["l", "j", "<right>", "<page_down>", "<down>", " "]

  # the keys that cause the presentation to move backwards.
  previous: ["h", "k", "<left>", "<page_up>", "<up>"]

  # the key binding to jump to the first slide.
  first_slide: ["gg"]

  # the key binding to jump to the last slide.
  last_slide: ["G"]

  # the key binding to jump to a specific slide.
  go_to_slide: ["<number>G"]

  # the key binding to execute a piece of shell code.
  execute_code: ["<c-e>"]

  # the key binding to reload the presentation.
  reload: ["<c-r>"]

  # the key binding to toggle the slide index modal.
  toggle_slide_index: ["<c-p>"] 

  # the key binding to toggle the key bindings modal.
  toggle_bindings: ["?"] 

  # the key binding to close the currently open modal.
  close_modal: ["<esc>"]

  # the key binding to close the application.
  exit: ["<c-c>", "q"]

  # the key binding to suspend the application.
  suspend: ["<c-z>"]

You can choose to override any of them. Keep in mind these are overrides so if for example you change next, the default won't apply anymore and only what you've defined will be used.

Snippet configurations

Snippet execution

Snippet execution is disabled by default for security reasons. Besides passing in the -x command line parameter every time you run presenterm, you can also configure this globally for all presentations by setting:

snippet:
  exec:
    enable: true

Use this at your own risk, especially if you're running someone else's presentations!

Snippet execution + replace

Snippet execution + replace is disabled by default for security reasons. Similar to +exec, this can be enabled by passing in the -X command line parameter or configuring it globally by setting:

snippet:
  exec_replace:
    enable: true

Use this at your own risk. This will cause presenterm to execute code without user intervention so don't blindly enable this and open a presentation unless you trust its origin!

Custom snippet executors

If presenterm doesn't support executing code snippets for your language of choice, please create an issue! Alternatively, you can configure this locally yourself by setting:

snippet:
  exec:
    custom:
      # The keys should be the language identifier you'd use in a code block.
      c++:
        # The name of the file that will be created with your snippet's contents.
        filename: "snippet.cpp"

        # A list of environment variables that should be set before building/running your code.
        environment:
          MY_FAVORITE_ENVIRONMENT_VAR: foo

        # A prefix that indicates a line that starts with it should not be visible but should be executed if the
        # snippet is marked with `+exec`.
        hidden_line_prefix: "/// "

        # A list of commands that will be ran one by one in the same directory as the snippet is in.
        commands:
          # Compile if first
          - ["g++", "-std=c++20", "snippet.cpp", "-o", "snippet"]
          # Now run it 
          - ["./snippet"]

The output of all commands will be included in the code snippet execution output so if a command (like the g++ invocation) was to emit any output, make sure to use whatever flags are needed to mute its output.

Also note that you can override built-in executors in case you want to run them differently (e.g. use c++23 in the example above).

See more examples in the executors.yaml file which defines all of the built-in executors.

Snippet rendering threads

Because some +render code blocks can take some time to be rendered into an image, especially if you're using mermaid charts, this is run asychronously. The number of threads used to render these, which defaults to 2, can be configured by setting:

snippet:
  render:
    threads: 2

Mermaid scaling

mermaid graphs will use a default scaling of 2 when invoking the mermaid CLI. If you'd like to change this use:

mermaid:
  scale: 2