Creating Technical Presentations with Vim [video] | Hacker News Reader

Creating Technical Presentations with Vim [video]

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I can appreciate the effort to warp something into doing a task it wasn’t designed for. That is cool!

But life is too short to not use a slides tool. Manually aligning bullet points, moving around ascii art, all of the settings to remove the vim status bar and a custom syntax mode to style text… I don’t know what you gain other than oh-that’s-not-google-slides brownie points. Your time is probably better spent working on the presentation.

> I don’t know what you gain other than oh-that’s-not-google-slides brownie points.

Well, there's at least better version control with git, and the other general benefits of plain text. If you have a bunch of presentations, easier to search among them based on content if they're plain text.

Though, presentations being presentations, the fact that they generally lack content to be useful on their own without their presenter, makes them kind of disposable as documents.

Or you can use LaTeX with Beamer. You have the goodness of plain text search and git and a nice pdf with slide controls when you want to present.

https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/Beamer

pandoc has the killer feature to use beamer to convert markdown to a good looking presentation. It's the simplest and quickest way of doing a presentation I'm aware of, you can just focus on the content: `pandoc -t beamer some_presentation.md -o some_presentation.pdf`

For diagrams, I'm using draw.io (it seems that it's called diagrams.net nowadays), it's FOSS, easy to use and feature-full. It's then easy to add it in the presentation by using the markdown syntax for images.

My personal setup is to write a presentation using markdown and use pandoc [1] with LaTeX beamer mode, then output to PDF. This is with a custom theme.

I think I could be inspired to come up with something somewhere in-between. Doing manual layout adds a lot of burden, but visually the result is nice.

Maybe add something to automatically run some code blocks (like Jupyter Notebooks [+]), and we have a really good time.

[1] https://pandoc.org/

[+] Fun note: I wrote something like Jupyter notebooks to run code for LaTeX presentations automatically maybe some 10 years ago.

This is pretty cool.

I wonder what's the best way to have the presentation in a single file instead of using multiple files to switch between slides.

My first approach would be to start each slide with something like

    # Slide 1

Switching slides then can be done with a keyboard alias that searches for the next/previous instance of "^# Slide [0-9]".

To avoid having the next slide visible at the bottom of the screen, one could put enought empty lines at the end of each slide. This would actually be a bit cumbersome. Maybe there is a better solution?

Another problem I see is margins. In a nice presentation, there is a good bit of margin around the content. Unfortunately, VIM has no concept of margin. And emulating it with newlines and spaces is very cumbersome. As you cannot easily change it.

You can create presentations with markdown using RevealJS.

They are surprisingly high fidelity. You can even do line by line code highlight animations etc.

All defined with markdown.

https://revealjs.com/markdown/

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