Vimdeck - Vim as a presentation tool | Hacker News Reader

Vimdeck - Vim as a presentation tool

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100 pointsscottksmith9526 comments

My fear with this is that it will be less "bullet proof" than creating a PDF slidedeck. With this I'll have to worry about getting the fontsize correct on the projector, which means I have to worry about getting a terminal set up on whichever computer I may be using for a presentation (hopefully my own, but I can't count on that) and (in the case that it isn't my own) I have to worry about networking too.

With a PDF slidedeck I can have the PDF on my computer, on the network, and on a flashdrive, I don't have to worry about presentation software compatibility or installing Gvim+plugins or putty, I don't have to worry about font-size, etc.

If I could be absolutely sure that the presentation was going to be given from my computer, then I think this would be great.

To be honest, when I made Vimdeck, it was mostly just-for-fun. I never really expected that other people would seriously consider using it for their presentations.

Now that I've seen how many people are interested in it, though, I might spend some time adding more features to it to make it a more viable option.

As you pointed out, there's not a great way to take this format and use it on someone else's machine.

First, I'd like to point out that all Vimdeck is doing is generating files into a directory and opening them with VIM. There are a few VIM plugins as dependencies. Like markdown syntax highlighting, and SyntaxRange, but it's entirely possible that I could allow the users to bundle their presentation as a zip file, put it on a flash drive and open it on any other computer (most have VIM already installed).

There's no Gvim necessary. Just a couple of plugins and the dynamically generated VIM script. Seems plausible to be able to bundle all that into a machine-agnostic format. VIM already runs everywhere.

And as far as the font size goes, you're right. There's no way around it. You're going to have to increase/decrease the font size immediately before the presentation to get it just right. But there's often a chance for speakers to test that their slides work in the current environment any ways.

I'm not saying text-only ASCII-art-ridden presentations are the best way to present information. But depending on the crowd and the speaker, it might be worth it.

Looks cool. I've used something similar called vroom[1] once, and it worked quite well. But as soon as I realised I want to show a live webpage (or an image), I had to switch to a browser, and then it was easier to just switch to a markdown to html presentation tool instead (I picked remark[2] which I would recommend).

That said, I think it's important to focus on the core points of the presentation and not get distracted by graphics and layouts. It makes your presentations way better.

[1]http://search.cpan.org/~ingy/Vroom-0.23/lib/Vroom.pm [2]https://github.com/gnab/remark

Even though I really love my vim, i think sometimes it's ok to just go with LibreOffice or PowerPoint. nice job though!

I agree. I am a vim fanboy, but I don't see myself using this. Presentation is about how best you can convey an idea, and I don't see this being flexible enough to help me do that.

The only upside I can see, is that if you are updating very often a presentation while collaborating with someone else, it is easy to keep it under git.

There are other tools that let you write slides in MarkDown, which is then compiled to HTML to be rendered in a browser: https://github.com/search?q=markdown+slides&type=Repositorie...

or you could collaborate your presentation using 3d. that also would be easy to track under github.

I love vim too. Vim isn't the right tool for presentations. Then again, I find that PowerPoint or LibreOffice are just as bad.

I write all my presentations in LaTeX and use Beamer. Haven't found a better tool for the job (for my purposes).

In case you didn't know, Org-mode in Emacs has support for export to Beamer. It frees you up from needing to use LaTeX at all: http://orgmode.org/worg/exporters/beamer/tutorial.html

Probably not reason enough to learn Org-mode, but good to know if you know the Org-mode basics. (Basics of Org-mode are simple but it can get pretty complicated b/c so many features.)

Related: I also made a vim-based presentation tool, called git-slides [1]. The main difference between Vimdeck and git-slides is that vimdeck generates slides out of a simpler format (Markdown), while git-slides displays one WYSIWYG slide for each commit in your git history.

[1] https://github.com/gelisam/git-slides

Nice work on vimdeck. I like the idea. I ran into a problem while using this gem because it didn't automatically install the required dependencies while installing the vimdeck gem, so I submitted a pull request for the fix.

Looks great, you should totally make a short presentation showing it using http://shelr.tv/ or one of these ttyrec to gif converters.

I don't see myself firing up vim on a projector and doing an entire presentation that way, but this sounds like it could potentially be useful as a tool for explaining things to team members (it's not uncommon to huddle around a text editor anyway). Terminal meets whiteboard.

What's the equivalent for emacs?

I've seen plenty of these submitted before. A couple of others for Vim, too. I suspect they're more common for Emacs, though: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsPresentation

AuCTeX+LaTeX+Beamer

Yes, and then use doc-present:

https://github.com/dengste/doc-present

Related: https://github.com/fxn/tkn is a terminal-based presentation tool. Slides are written in Ruby, includes a few types of slides and even supports images if you're using iTerm2.

Was doing a little presentation on hacker culture at my office and I used vim instead of ppt. That was part of the things I wanted to say.

I didn't use buffers however, I just used a custom page breaks and a search trick like "search and jump ten lines below".

Also checkout https://wiki.gnome.org/Pinpoint, I just discovered this from a project manager at work...

Cool project. Was actually thinking about this as I'm currently working on my first ever presentation. Decided to go with reveal.js. Gonna keep an eye on this.

If you're looking at reveal.js, and you like ruby, check out reveal-ck: https://github.com/jedcn/reveal-ck. Write your slides in slim, haml, or ruby itself. Example of how to do everything in reveal.js but in slim here: https://github.com/jedcn/reveal-ck-template. General introduction in the README, more info here: http://jedcn.com/posts/reveal-ck.

Incorporating LaTeX for formatting would make this amazing - a WYSIWYM.

Just curious, why would you want something to write LaTeX for output constrained to fixed-width, low resolution output? (I've seen LaTeX used for presentations to great effect in the past, but always generated to PDF or something similar).

This + screen sharing over ssh. Watch out WebEx!

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