

Vimdeck - Vim as a presentation tool - scottksmith95
https://coderbits.com/posts/WJroMQ

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jlgreco
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.

~~~
tybenz
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.

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

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jan3er
Even though I really love my vim, i think sometimes it's ok to just go with
LibreOffice or PowerPoint. nice job though!

~~~
medius
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.

~~~
seren
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.

~~~
hk__2
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...](https://github.com/search?q=markdown+slides&type=Repositories&ref=searchresults)

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gelisam
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](https://github.com/gelisam/git-
slides)

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typicalrunt
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.

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

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nperez
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.

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gbog
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".

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MarcusBrutus
What's the equivalent for emacs?

~~~
Grue3
AuCTeX+LaTeX+Beamer

~~~
deng
Yes, and then use doc-present:

[https://github.com/dengste/doc-present](https://github.com/dengste/doc-
present)

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_raul
Related: [https://github.com/fxn/tkn](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.

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

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john2x
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.

~~~
jedcn
If you're looking at reveal.js, and you like ruby, check out reveal-ck:
[https://github.com/jedcn/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](https://github.com/jedcn/reveal-ck-template). General introduction
in the README, more info here: [http://jedcn.com/posts/reveal-
ck](http://jedcn.com/posts/reveal-ck).

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philip1209
Incorporating LaTeX for formatting would make this amazing - a WYSIWYM.

~~~
jonhohle
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).

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mikektung
This + screen sharing over ssh. Watch out WebEx!

