Inspiration

As someone who writes a lot of talks, I have always wanted to add live demos into my talks. However, I find the process of tabbing out to a separate screen too complex and prone to failure, and additionally there is no proper way to handle versions of presentations short of making copies.

What it does

PresenTerm is a Golang tool designed as a modern-day Keynote for the command line. It allows for entire slide decks to be written using Hashicorp Configuration Language, and supports built in command line calls including REPLs.

Challenges I ran into

The standard limitations of the Terminal and all associated graphical limitations apply here even more than usual, requiring a significant amount of technical tweaking to ensure that our designs worked well while still maintaining a good level of technical capability.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm especially pleased of the simple, yet easily readable HCL format I came up with for presentation design. It allows even a beginner with a text editor to write presentations quickly and with high levels of complexity.

What's next for PresenTerm

I would like to increase the feature set of this project going forwards, including features such as cross-network slide presentation, a Master view with slide notes, and potentially even a full video player.

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