presentation in vim

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Updated on September 29, 2020 in #dev-environment , #vim

Giving a Text Based Slide Presentation in Vim without Plugins

In this video we'll add a few lines to our vimrc file so we can easily cycle between slides. we'll use goyo too, but that's optional..

While preparing for a talk I’m giving soon about using the command line and terminal I wanted a quick and easy way to show text based slides within Vim.

After a bit of fiddling around, this was the end result. It’s a few lines of code that can be dropped into your .vimrc file and technically it requires no plugins.

Although in this case I am using Goyo to make it look better. You can replicate what Goyo does without using it by setting a few stock vimrc options if you don’t want to use Goyo.

# Demo Video

• 0:31 – Doable without plugins but Goyo is nice to have
• 0:47 – Setting up your slides in a directory of .vpm files
• 1:09 – Cycling between slides with the right and left arrow keys
• 1:49 – Configuring your vimrc to deliver text based slides
• 3:45 – That was deceptively easy but it works

Reference Links

• https://www.meetup.com/nyhackr/events/272727821/
• Direct link to vimrc slides snippet
• https://github.com/junegunn/goyo.vim

Are you going to give a talk using this method? Let us know below.

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Creating presentations with VIM (Video)

When giving presentations, I usually don’t use slides, but a live-coding and live-demoing approach, with some minimalistic “editor-like” slides using VIM. I’ve got asked many times how to make these presentations, so I decided to record a video how to create technical presentations in VIM, with ASCII art diagrams, colored highlights, and some scripting.

What you see in the presentations are only ASCII files opened with the VIM editor, which is set to some specific configuration. You can have a look at my Dotfiles on GitHub how to configure the .vimrc file.

Happy VIM presenting!

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Using Vim/GVim for slideshow presentation

I came across this video about Vim. I would like to ask how can you create a presentation like in the video which seems to run inside Vim.

On some slides there are also real pictures displayed. Check 7:25 and 25:20 of the video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MquaityA1SM

Anyone knows how this is done?

• Not so sure that is inside Vim...but I'm interested to know for sure. –  Wildcard Commented Nov 1, 2015 at 5:52
• For a moment, I thought I was missing something. The slides are probably HTML pages styled to look like Vim. Around 12:53, he was using Vim for demo, then quit using :x to go back to the presentation. Thanks for your replies! –  yinyangero Commented Nov 1, 2015 at 15:14
• Maybe Emacs can do it? ;) –  Alexey Commented Nov 18, 2015 at 5:48

4 Answers 4

I was watching that video yesterday and had basically the same question. As Wildcard already pointed out, I am pretty sure that the images are not directly displayed in Vim.

What I did for my current presentation is just a little bash script that opens all markdown files (*.md) in a separate tab. The script also changes my vimrc to one with a light background.

There is also git-slides or vimdeck that both look very promising, but did not work for me particularly well.

• +1 for git-slides, which seems very useful –  mMontu Commented Nov 4, 2015 at 11:51
• mdp doesn't do images like the OP is asking about but I've used it many times for presentations. –  gabe Commented Apr 11, 2020 at 22:37

That presentation is just a pdf . You can find the link at the bottom of most slides.

In order to get real pictures in vim you have to get a terminal emulator that can show images. I don't know linux options, but for macOS, ITerm2 does it perfectly. ITerms2 has a special escape sequence that can be used by any terminal app to tell the emulator to print an image.

So you could program an autocommand that tells vim to run a command (imgcat for ITerms2) when it opens a .png .gif or .svg and to kill the buffer (so the binary code of the image does not open). This one does the job :

Another option is to open it with another app. For example, you could create your own extetion, like .vpng (vim png), and tell vim to read its contents (that would be the address of the image) and to pass it to a command. Example : your slide10.vpng file would contain path/to/my_image.png and then, when vim opens the file, it runs open [file contents] , so here : open path/to/my_image.png . I don't know the linux command to run, but both solutions worked for me.

For presentations I found few useful plugins (not mandatory, but very useful) and options.

Goyo - distraction free

The plugin Goyo , that removes all the visual elements (line numbering, status bar, tabs...) to make kind of like the VSCode "zen mode". Cool for presentations (I assume you don't want these elements).

Vim markdown - markdown right in vim

The plugin vim-markdown , that shows pretty markdown, like in emacs org-mode (the surrounding * or _ are removed when your cursor is not on the line). I use it with the g:vim_markdown_math set to 1 to I have kink of a LaTeX equation preview.

Configurations

I use the .vpm extension for my presentations. The idea is to make a file named 000.vpm , and a 001.vpm , then 002.vpm etc. so vim will open them in the right order. Then I open them all with vim *.vpm .

Then, you can add some special highlighting for titles etc. if you don't like the basic ones for markdown. Here en example (just putted simple colours) :

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Posted on 2021-09-16 , in Programming , tagged with vim

Presenting in VIM

If you have to present something that contains mostly code and no graphics, you can stay in vim. The benefit is that you can write your presentation like code. Also, often when talking about code it is useful to show some real code, and that is easiest when you are already in the right tool.

Write your "Slides" in Markdown, starting with a new Headline in line 50, 100, 150, ...

Some configuration is necessary to:

• hide every visual distraction
• Add a margin
• increase your font size
• enable smooth navigation.

Points one and two are simply some settings. Which exactly depends on you normal setup and plugins. Enabling cursorline helps in online meetings if you would normally point at things with your finger.

The font is either controlled by your terminal ( CTRL+SCROLL_WHEEL in termnator) or by a setting set guifont=Consolas:18 in GVim/ neovim-qt . It should be large enough that bad projectors or vidoe codecs over low bandwith online meetings still produce something readable.

Smooth navigation is achieved by a mapping that snaps lines 50, 100, 150, ... to the top of the screen. I currently have the following present.vim which I source when necessary:

I navigate through the "slides" using F2 for previous, F4 for next and F3 to realign the slide to the top of the screen. F5 marks a URL inside <> and opens it in firefox , so you can show a picture.

You can play around using present.vim and presentation.md

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A simple tool for presenting slides in vim based on text files.

vim-scripts/presenting.vim

Folders and files.

Repository files navigation

Presenting.vim.

presenting.vim is a simple tool for presenting slides in vim based on text files.

It is a clone of https://github.com/pct/present.vim which is a clone of https://github.com/sorah/presen.vim

In contrast to its predecessors presenting.vim

• has support for a number of markup languages,
• can be extended, and
• is documented

Great, hey?

Installation

Use pathogen_ or vundle_ to install presenting.vim.

• https://github.com/tpope/vim-pathogen
• https://github.com/gmarik/vundle
• write you presentation in your favorite markup language
• every slide is separated by a markup language specific marker

When you want to start presenting execute:

Navigation:

• n - next slide
• p - previous slide

Also, take a look at the presenting.vim examples:

• PresentingExample.markdown
• PresentingExample.rst
• PresentingExample.org

Of course you can configure the slide separators.

The code is on github. Pull requests are welcome!

• https://github.com/sotte/presenting.vim

Issue tracker:

• https://github.com/sotte/presenting.vim/issues
• Vim Script 100.0%