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Sent – Simple plaintext presentation tool
- aserr 3y agoI like the concept. If you’re looking for something with a little more capability and that fits nicely into a Markdown-centric workflow, there is also Marp: https://marp.app/ https://marp.app/
- rockwotj 3y agoI also recommend https://sli.dev/ https://sli.dev/ it’s pretty batteries included and mdx based
- terhechte 3y agoI also wrote an app like that (macOS only) https://hyperdeck.io/ https://hyperdeck.io/
- mjklin 3y agoFor Sublime Text users, there’s a package called Markdown Slideshow that works well.
- eightysixfour 3y agoThe folks who make iA Writer have one as well: https://ia.net/presenter https://ia.net/presenter
- kstrauser 3y agoI lack words to adequately express how much I prefer Presenter to something like Keynote or Google Slides. It’s just brilliant, and they put a huge amount of thought into making the output look beautiful. Bonus points for being able to export in PDF, Word, etc. in various combinations of with/without speaker’s notes, ruled notetaking sections ok each page, and a bunch of other pleasant details.
- pea-tear 3y agoI built presenterm (https://github.com/mfontanini/presenterm https://github.com/mfontanini/presenterm). Also a terminal based presentation tool which uses markdown, and supports images, PDF exports, etc.
- zelphirkalt 3y agoThe title reminded me of the Racket sublanguage for presentations.
- Aachen 3y agoI like simple tools, but this may be too minimalist for most presentations I see being held, or virtually any presentation I make. Adding an image on the side of text, or even anywhere on a text slide, is something I'll want in probably 80% of the presentations I do. One could use image editing for the same effect, particularly if this supports SVG and thus the added text won't get blurry, but that seems rather roundabout My employer has a Latex template which we use by default (I've also made a LibreOffice one for the one time I wanted a video in there). The only annoying thing is that you need to memorize or look up a handful of things like how to align an image the way you want (e.g. below/besides text), but other than that it's about as simple to use as this tool. The advantage of Sent would be skipping the initial setup, but then Sent also doesn't give you any design elements like a title page or slide numbers for people to refer back to I'm also wondering in what version of 2014 (initial git commit: https://git.suckless.org/sent/commit/2e435b7da8067f4e6934bbd25044d91cbc00e3a2.html https://git.suckless.org/sent/commit/2e435b7da8067f4e6934bbd...) it made sense to write a GUI tool in plain old C, or why this git server makes you press "parent commit" 30 times to find the initial commit
- bee_rider 3y agoYeah I like: Latex/Beamer with a good template and, like, don’t add anything that is fighting against the framework. Of course you can do anything in Latex, so bring your own restraint IMO.
- samatman 3y ago> Slides with exuberant amount of lines or characters produce rendering glitches intentionally to prevent you from holding bad presentations. Welp. That's suckless for ya. In a 1000 line, minimalist presentation tool, there is logic devoted to screwing up the output if it doesn't conform to some guy's opinion of what a slide should look like. I would say that sucks more, rather than less, than the same tool without the bad attitude. But then it wouldn't be suckless.
- renerick 3y agoI don't think there is "logic" for screwing up the output, more likely the implementation is bugged and they just didn't bother to fix those glitches, and then put it on the page as "feature". At least, I failed to find any relevant code, but I could easily be missing it. And I still would agree, that kind of sucks
- jagged-chisel 3y agoOr likely the more content you attempt to add, the harder it is to layout. Rather than add logic to do anything about it, just let the layout logic run rampant.
- jdiff 3y agoHere I thought part of the allure of suckless development was that simple code held less bugs and was more flexible given fewer moving parts.
- berkes 3y agoWhy would it not be?
- jagged-chisel 3y agoI don’t know how one could possibly get infinite flexibility and robustness in any case, let alone with simple code and fewer moving parts.
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- tagyro 3y agoTo mirror another comment: I really like the concept and will give it a try. As an alternative, I want to suggest Quarto - https://quarto.org https://quarto.org - somewhat similar, easy to use, one might even call it "basic" (I mean that in a good way!) 7/5 ^^
- barnacs 3y agoMight as well just xdg-open files in a directory in alphanumeric order by name as a "presentation" at this point.
- dash2 3y agoI once watched a Nobel prize winner present. His presentation was a Word document, and he presented by scrolling down. For bonus points you could do the same with `less`.
- pests 3y agoI bet presentations or Word documents weren't what he won his Nobel for!
- godDLL 3y agoAha. So he won his prize by his alonesome. With no exchanging of any ideas to any other party. Like, in his parents' basement, right.
- pests 3y agoWhat? My point being is people communicate and share ideas in a variety of ways. And if it works it works! We tech people like to get the "correct system" in place but for many it's just a means to an end. If he wants to use Word over PowerPoint or a proper presentation software that's completely fine. And he has the Nobel to prove it.
- macintux 3y agoYes, that was a bizarre interpretation of your comment.
- globular-toast 3y agoYeah I've met plenty of talented people who are terrible at presenting their work. I've often thought such people would benefit from a partner, someone understands the value of the work but is better at channelling it to the world. Like a producer is to a musician.
- xmprt 3y agoI think if the information in a presentation can be represented this simply then it probably doesn't have to be a presentation.
- jntnctrs 3y agoThis made me think of LookAtMe, a python markdown-to-text-presentation tool, which supports embedded terminal among other features. https://lookatme.readthedocs.io/en/latest/getting_started.html https://lookatme.readthedocs.io/en/latest/getting_started.ht...
- jrm4 3y agoThis reminds me a bit of the thing I started doing years ago, tweaked to my liking and never looked back -- and I'm just now thinking "Wow, it's weird that no one has made this better in a more formal way." Anyway, its S5 slides, like this: https://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/ https://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/ And I just tweaked the CSS and added a bit of logic to included the possibility of one image per slide; as well as editing slides not with raw HTML but with https://zim-wiki.org https://zim-wiki.org (because that's what I'm really used to, I'm sure any Markdown thing would work just as well).
- satisfice 3y agoGreat tool for people who hate giving a good presentation.
- satisfice 3y agoSeriously, any presentation given with this tool would likely be improved by not having any slides at all. Just admit it-- you don't like giving talks. That's okay, but why punish your audience with a wall of bland text? How is this better than making a rich text document in Word or something and just scrolling down it as you talk? There are a lot of things I wish were different about PowerPoint, but it remains the best tool for the teaching I do (representing almost the entirety of my income for years). I augment it with a zooming and panning app I wrote using Processing.
- IshKebab 3y agoEh there are loads of these based on Markdown that are much better. I think revealjs is the most popular, but I like remarkjs: https://github.com/gnab/remark https://github.com/gnab/remark There's a list of them here: https://gist.github.com/johnloy/27dd124ad40e210e91c70dd1c24ac8c8 https://gist.github.com/johnloy/27dd124ad40e210e91c70dd1c24a... I don't know why this needs to exist given all those... I guess it was just a fun project?
- 3abiton 3y agoThe beamer in me is too stubborn to change.
- chrisnight 3y ago> I don't know why this needs to exist given all those... I guess it was just a fun project? The answer is already in your reply. This is a pure approach that has 3 dependencies: xlib, xft, and farbfield, while the other solutions proposed (except perhaps some cli options at the bottom) have much larger and complex dependencies like Electron, Node, React, etc. The point of this isn't to have features but be the absolute bare minimum (to the point of being almost unusable albeit). Personally, I see suckless apps as more of an experiment to see just how bare you can go while keeping foundational functionality. They definitely aren't made to be a featureful app though, only the bare minmimum. As for why was it made then? Why not?
- knowledge-clay 3y agoI’ve used Adelie, which has its own postscript-like notation to render font and graphics inside a tiny VM. I love it https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/adelie.html https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/adelie.html
- muxl 3y agoI've done a number of text-based slide presentations with `marp` and I've been pleased with the results. Mostly it's just plain markdown slides but if you want to get into the weeds with HTML and have a 2-column slide or something you can do it. https://marp.app/ https://marp.app/
- tamimio 3y agoI believe in the opposite, when it comes to presentations, you better include pictures and videos or even 3D render with animation, highlight words with other colors or size and so on, if I am for a plaintext slide, send it as an email, presentations are already boring using the default templates don’t make it worse. This whole “bare minimalistic” approach can be useful in some scenarios, just don’t try to force it every where, windows Vista UI for example was probably one of the best UI before going to minimal/flat design and such.
- Jtsummers 3y agoIt supports images (though not videos and animations). > sent does not need latex, libreoffice or any other fancy file format, it uses plaintext files to describe the slides and can also display images The plaintext part is how you describe the presentation, not the presentation itself.
- nonrandomstring 3y agoBoth extremes are good. I've used Pure-Data and Unreal as daily drive presentation tools for hundreds of lectures. The former is really live coding, which is a great way to teach and communicate. A complex presentation can be just like a bunch of boxes (subpatches) connected together to do stuff - and its easy to build almost like a "mind map" by connecting them. For Unreal, I found the best way to teach game/VR concepts was from within the world. It got tedious switching between PDF slides and the engine, so why not just build a slide presenter inside the bare constructor space. As for plain text... I love it for presentations. Emacs org-mode is perfect when you want to execute code via babel, and just see stuff in a simple, foldable list, then dive down into the content.
- nikau 3y agoPandoc can create powerpoints from markdown which is my preferred workflow
- twobitshifter 3y agoFirst time hearing of the Takahashi Method. The way I transform text to slides is with quarto support for reveal.js This does everything you need and means you can keep it plain text and code in a qmd file.
- bitwize 3y agoJust use PowerPoint. If you don't have it, open a ticket to have IT install it on your corporate issued Mac, or use Jamf Self Setvice. Geez.
- anthk 3y agoMac worldwide is niche, and most it backend/developers are GNU/Linux bound.
- James_K 3y ago> No export function. If you really need one, just use a shell script with xdotool and your favorite screenshot application. > Slides with exuberant amount of lines or characters produce rendering glitches intentionally to prevent you from holding bad presentations. This reads like a parody of Suckless software. Why would anyone use this over the most basic alternative with something like Markdown or HTML in conjunction with a PDF viewer? It's not as if anyone using computers now doesn't have a PDF viewer, so I fail to see the practical utility in re-implementing a tiny fraction of its functionality. If I may be so bold and scathing, I would like to generalise this to Suckless as a whole. Their issue seems to be with "bloat" in modern computers, but we have the disk space and CPU cycles to accommodate featureful software written in safe and simple programming languages. Writing software only in C and putting a strict line limit on it simply isn't necessary. The code produced will be of a lower quality and the software produced will have insufficient features. I stand by my belief that it is is possible to write software that provides many features, to do so with a responsive and pleasing UI, in a manner that does not excessively use system resources, and with code that is open to extension and modification. In short: good software is possible. Yet the Suckless style seems to ignore many of the aspects of good software under the false assertion that they come at the cost of others. A piece of software that lacks features is worse than a bloated piece of software with sufficient features as the latter can actually achieve what user wants, though both are worse than non-bloated software with sufficient features.
- crq-yml 3y agoSuckless has always hinged on parody of "good" software, but it retains an audience of modders who take the core that doesn't work, and add the two or three things they want. If they actually wanted a succinct system they could use Forth.
- yawpitch 3y agoThe older I get the more I feel that features are a bug.
- James_K 3y agoThen turn off your computer. No features, no bugs, and you'll be much happier too.
- lencastre 3y agoThis is cool, I’ve been using https://apps.apple.com/pt/app/minimal-folio/id385429744 https://apps.apple.com/pt/app/minimal-folio/id385429744 — minimal folio — for a while and like that simplicity and presentation controls as well.
- sooheon 3y agoDeckset was the OG in this space, which I used a decade (!) ago in college. Looks like they moved off the Mac App Store, and are bringing out an iOS app now: https://www.deckset.com https://www.deckset.com Now I much prefer something like https://quarto.org https://quarto.org with dataviz.
- wpm 3y agoNotepad.exe wasn’t even the OG, but it definitely predates the App Store. I worked with an old greybeard who used Notepad for presentations, with text spaced perfectly to switch “slides” by hitting the PgDn key.
- codemusings 3y agoThere's an xkcd comic for that: https://xkcd.com/378/ https://xkcd.com/378/
- INTPenis 3y agoI'd prefer markdown actually. This should not be complicated, it should be as simple as making a theme for a static site generator that supports markdown. I already found one alternative through quick googling. https://themes.gohugo.io/themes/reveal-hugo/ https://themes.gohugo.io/themes/reveal-hugo/ I used to make presentations with slide.js, web-based, worked just fine. But now I think I'd rather use a static site generator to make it even simpler. Honestly I'm not even happy with the reveal-hugo solution. I think it should be one dir per presentation, one file per slide, and browsing left or right should be similar to selecting the next and previous blog post. Keep it simple, keep it as close as possible to a regular website design.
- jll29 3y agoThis is a good tool for people who have something to say. I like its minimalist approach, although realistically, one probably still needs LaTeX to create figures for mathematical formulae in scientific/technical fields. I also see value in teaching/learning to create presentations. As we all know, with both PPT and LaTeX people tend to spend a lot of time fiddling with formatting issues, at the expense of improving the distillation of ideas [1]. PPT and fellows are often used to distract from lack of subtance (which is the reason it is forbidden at Amazon [2], where they read & discuss prose text reports instead). [1] https://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucbpmbc/old/ppoint.html https://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucbpmbc/old/ppoint.html [2] https://www.managementtoday.co.uk/why-amazon-banned-powerpoint/leadership-lessons/article/1689543 https://www.managementtoday.co.uk/why-amazon-banned-powerpoi...
- padthai 3y agoSent is not compatible with sharing screen with Teams in MacOS. This actually got me into trouble.
- 6510 3y agoneeds a video demo explaining everything.