Sent – Simple plaintext presentation tool | Hacker News Reader

Sent – Simple plaintext presentation tool

tools.suckless.org

215 pointsmidzer69 comments

I 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/

The folks who make iA Writer have one as well: https://ia.net/presenter

I 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.

I also wrote an app like that (macOS only)

https://hyperdeck.io/

I also recommend https://sli.dev/ it’s pretty batteries included and mdx based

I built presenterm (https://github.com/mfontanini/presenterm). Also a terminal based presentation tool which uses markdown, and supports images, PDF exports, etc.

For Sublime Text users, there’s a package called Markdown Slideshow that works well.

To 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 - somewhat similar, easy to use, one might even call it "basic" (I mean that in a good way!) 7/5 ^^

Deckset 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

Now I much prefer something like https://quarto.org with dataviz.

Notepad.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.

There's an xkcd comic for that: https://xkcd.com/378/

> 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.

I 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

Or 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.

Here I thought part of the allure of suckless development was that simple code held less bugs and was more flexible given fewer moving parts.

I don’t know how one could possibly get infinite flexibility and robustness in any case, let alone with simple code and fewer moving parts.

Why would it not be?

I get that it may sucks, but it is better to get an alert message? Or just do the rendering glitches?

What is cool about this project is stuff like this. >The presentation is displayed in a simple X11 window colored black on white for maximum contrast even if the sun shines directly onto the projected image. The content of each slide is automatically scaled to fit the window so you don't have to worry about alignment. Instead you can really focus on the content.

One can tell the author really had to use this deck in real situations.

"suckless" is a perfect name for this software suite—not because of the name's literal meaning, but because they are advertising their insufferable elitism right on the tin.

Yes, building software to solve a limited set of problems can lead to great software. But for god's sake, if your core philosophy is that you're better than everyone else, then you're primarily going to attract developers and users who also think they're better than everyone else.

The result is that instead of contributing to a mission that conveys a useful message, you just dig an elitist moat around yourselves that people can't float across unless their egos are so inflated that they're buoyant.

> if your core philosophy is that you're better than everyone else, then you're primarily going to attract developers and users who also think they're better than everyone else.

That's an unfair characterization. Their philosophy[1] says nothing of the sort. The gist of it is a focus on building software with "simplicity, clarity and frugality" in mind, targeted at "advanced and experienced computer users". There's nothing elitist about that.

It's a rejection of the trend of making complex, hard to use and maintain software. Have they gone too far, and end up alienating most users? Perhaps. But people like their software because of their goals and design sensibilities, not because they want to become part of some elite club. That's an old and boring argument people often apply to Unix/Linux users as well. Do better.

[1]: https://suckless.org/philosophy/

Not that I mind their goals or philosophy, but isn't catering to "advanced and experienced computer users" a clear case of elitism?

I wouldn't say so. It doesn't imply that these users are superior, just that the software is targeted at that audience. This is no different than software targeted at children, novice users, or any other group of users.

But then again, they do mention they want to avoid "stupid questions" from novice users on the dwm page, so there is an air of superiority there I don't support.

"stupid questions" doesn't sound too bad until you actually experience the deterioration of communities. For suckless I don't think it's a threat, as their specialization already filters the 99 percent. But try to find, for example, a community for experts in Java. I personally think it is a fine language, but it was designed to appeal to beginner/intermediate programmers, and any community around it suffers from that. You wouldn't believe how many people just open Github issues (with nothing but a title - the default issue template left untouched) for any NullPointerException, regardless if it is related or not.

StackOverflow is an interesting case also, they get a lot of criticism for being "toxic", but it is getting difficult to get answers to actually interesting questions. "How do i read a CPU register in C?" gets answered with "why would you want to access the CPU registers ??? It is an low level implementation detail therefore you cannot read them".

I hear you, I regret making such a generalization, and my negatively was uncalled for. Thanks for reminding me to check myself.

> Their philosophy[1] says nothing of the sort

Their philosophy doesn't, but their page for dwm[0] does :D

"Because dwm is customized through editing its source code, it's pointless to make binary packages of it. This keeps its userbase small and elitist. No novices asking stupid questions. There are some distributions that provide binary packages though."

[0] https://dwm.suckless.org/

Welp, I stand corrected. :D

I have to say, that is a bit obnoxious. Still, I don't think it's right to generalize that their users ascribe to that mentality. Quality software can be produced by people we don't agree with morally.

So, what? Everything in the world that anyone makes needs to be free of the author’s opinionated way of how to do things or how they like them done?

Honestly, just use something else if you care that much about it. Or make your own.

But don’t shit all over someone’s work because whatever biases you have aren’t aligned with the author’s project. You are obviously not the target market anyway.

It's not like there aren’t valid alternatives, or that this is a captive market.

I’m sure Microsoft or Google would love another rounding error to add to their metrics. You get the added benefit of any personal touches, opinions, or human aspects pre-stripped for your enjoyment!

> But don’t shit all over someone’s work

This is an ironic thing to say in a discussion of suckless.

I'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/

Eh 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

There's a list of them here: 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?

> 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?

The beamer in me is too stubborn to change.

> 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.

Suckless 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.

The older I get the more I feel that features are a bug.

Then turn off your computer. No features, no bugs, and you'll be much happier too.

I’d rather keep using my computer but focus on things that do one thing well, rather than many things poorly or not at all.

I’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

I 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/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

Yeah 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.

Pandoc can create powerpoints from markdown which is my preferred workflow

Might as well just xdg-open files in a directory in alphanumeric order by name as a "presentation" at this point.

I 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`.

I bet presentations or Word documents weren't what he won his Nobel for!

Aha. So he won his prize by his alonesome. With no exchanging of any ideas to any other party. Like, in his parents' basement, right.

What?

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.

Yes, that was a bizarre interpretation of your comment.

Yeah 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.

John Nash was famously a bad teacher and presenter.

That's what I do. Well, "vim *" and increase font size.

Works well enough.

Can't do images, but never had a desire to.

Saves mucking about with tools.

you probably can do images with vim, either rendered as colored ascii or with some third party software such as w3m (text based web browser that can render images in the terminal)

At that point I'd rather just write a bunch of basic HTML files and use that – seems less effort than figuring all of that out.

This 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

[2] https://www.managementtoday.co.uk/why-amazon-banned-powerpoi...

I'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/

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.

This 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/

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 (because that's what I'm really used to, I'm sure any Markdown thing would work just as well).

I 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.

Both 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.

It 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.

I think if the information in a presentation can be represented this simply then it probably doesn't have to be a presentation.

This is cool, I’ve been using https://apps.apple.com/pt/app/minimal-folio/id385429744 — minimal folio — for a while and like that simplicity and presentation controls as well.

This 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.ht...

First 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.

Sent is not compatible with sharing screen with Teams in MacOS. This actually got me into trouble.

The title reminded me of the Racket sublanguage for presentations.

Great tool for people who hate giving a good presentation.

Seriously, 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.

Just 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.

Mac worldwide is niche, and most it backend/developers are GNU/Linux bound.

needs a video demo explaining everything.

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