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Presentation (replay!) of text or terminal action in Vim. Copy any kind of text from the terminal into a file and use Posero or use any kind of plain text file to use it as presentation material.

I consider this plugin as pre-alpha status, that is, I have it in an utterly inconsistent state where I keep breaking it. Try it out, let me know what you think and send me some feedback, but do realize this is still work in progress.

Short screencast: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtlxLAuWn3A

I researched a bunch of terminal recording applications including ttyrec but all of them lacked the ability to all of these features I wanted:

• Be able to start/stop/rewind/forward/clear a session.
• Post editing (a few apps saved their output to a binary). Nothing better than plain text files.
• Add notes to actual output, like comments.
• Arbitrary, powerful syntax highlighting adpated to your color scheme.
• Custom specific options per slide.
• Add custom syntax to non-syntax output (for example: curl output)

The simplest way to get started, once the plugin is installed, is by calling the plugin and pass in a file as an argument.

make sure you set default mappings

In your .vimrc:

let g:posero_default_mappings = 1

Lets assume we have the following output from our terminal and we have saved it as terminal_test.txt

/tmp $ cd
~ $ cd /var
/var $ cd log
/var/log $ ls | grep apache
apache2
/var/log $

To execute this as a "presentation" you would start vim and type the path to that file:

:Posero terminal_test.txt

Once it loads, you will get a blank buffer ready to be used with the loaded text. Just hit Ctrl-l and see what happens!

For more options, tweaks, syntax and flow control, read below.

Mappings have to be enabled, so make sure you have the following flag set on your .vimrc:

let g:posero_default_mappings = 1

To just use your own mappings and disable the default ones set the value to zero:

let g:posero_default_mappings = 0

If you do not have any mappings and are not enabling or turning off the setting, the plugin will warn you about this problem.

These are the default mappings for the plugin:

• Ctrl-h = Previous slide
• Ctrl-j = Next line
• Ctrl-k = Previous line
• Ctrl-l = Next slide

If you don't like those, you can set your own custom mappings as the plugin allows calls to the functions that control the flow of the presentation. This is how you would map arrow keys for the length of the presentation:

nnoremap <silent> <buffer> <up>    :call posero#PreviousLine()<CR>
nnoremap <silent> <buffer> <down>  :call posero#NextLine()<CR>
nnoremap <silent> <buffer> <right> :call posero#NextSlide()<CR>
nnoremap <silent> <buffer> <left>  :call posero#PreviousSlide()<CR>

You can obviously map these to any key combination you want, the above are only suggestions.

If you need to clear the screen for a new slide you just need to add a delimeter. in Posero that means the > character repeated at least 80 times:

this would be slide number one

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

and this would be slide number two. You would not see any of the text
from the first slide here.

As you can imagine, all of this action is hapenning on real Vim buffers, so Posero harness into this by allowing you to set any type of valid Vim options per slide. This is done with a simple syntax:

POSERO>> echo "this will get executed when the slide loads!"

this is some text on the slide. The above option will not appear here.

All slide options are reset from one slide to another, so unless you are making system-wide changes (like setting the filetype to something different) you need to set them again to have the same behavior, this avoids sticky options where previous slide options are applied for the current one.

If you want old fashioned slides that output a bunch of text all at once as soon as you get to a given slide, you need 2 options playing together:

POSERO>> let b:posero_auto_next_line = 1
POSERO>> let b:posero_push_all = 1

The auto_next_line option tells the plugin to trigger a call to the next line, which in turn realizes that push_all is set and it will get everything on that slide printed at once.

To have a more realistic feel, you can enable fake typing on certain lines. This is done by matching the line to a regular expression set by an option on the actual slide.

Fake typing for lines that have a dollar sign for example would be enabled like this:

POSERO>> let b:posero_fake_type = "^\$"

Every line that starts with a dollar sign would have fake typing on. All of the rest would have an atomic display of the actual line. But that is just half of the equation, the other half is to be able to display chunked output to mimic executing commands and getting some output. But this is not enabled by default when the fake typing is set.

The normal flow would be to output one line every time you hit the "next" mapping (l or <down>) and undo a single line every time you hit the "previous" mapping (h or <up>). Chunked output is a boolean option and can be set like:

POSERO>> let b:posero_push_on_non_fake = 1

You could also fake type the whole slide. To accomplish this you would need to set b:posero_fake_type and b:posero_push_all on the slide like this:

POSERO>> let b:posero_push_all = 1
POSERO>> let b:posero_fake_type = '\v(.*)'

This will go through every line and matching fake typing but will continue to push lines because b:posero_push_all is set.

This plugin comes with a directory for custom syntax files called posero_syntax and it should be at the top level of the plugin directory with a few examples on how they should look like. If you just saved an IPython session and want to use the custom syntax bundled with this plugin you would set it like this on the slide:

POSERO>> let b:posero_syntax = "ipython"

As you may notice, the name of the syntax is the same as the first portion of the syntax file (in this case, called ipython.vim). Any new syntax files would have to follow that pattern. For example, if you have one for curl you would need to add a posero_syntax/curl.vim file and then do:

POSERO>> let b:posero_syntax = "curl"

Having the ability for custom syntax highlighting is nice, but remember, Posero allows you to do real Vim syntax and options, so if you are presenting a pure Python file you could just set the filetype to python:

POSERO>> set filetype=python

That is also useful if you are changing from some Python to RestructuredText on the next slide, and you want RST syntax there. Posero will call those options on every slide change so your changes are set before anything is displayed.

Posero has its own syntax highlighting. This is automatically set for you if you are naming your presentation file with the .posero extension.

A very basic status line is set by default with the current line number, total line numbers of the current slide on the left and the slide number with the total slide numbers on the right:

Line:[1/18]                                         Slide:[1/4]

The name comes from peruvian slang, that basically means "show off". You do want to show of your terminal action, don't you?