Tkn2

Tkn2 is a presentation tool for the terminal. It's heavily inspired in Xavier Noria's tkn (Terminal Keynote).

See usage.

Tkn2 is work in progress. First goal is compatibility with tkn (it's almost there) and, from there, keep building interesting features. Although the initial idea is to clone it, it might drop complete compatibility in some future point.

Main differences with tkn:

• The commands are not available in the general namespace; you need to wrap the slides in a Tkn2.deck block
• It's packed as a gem, and intended to use with bundler via a Gemfile. That may sound like overkill but, with tkn2 evolving, it's nice to have each deck stored with a explicit reference to the verion of tkn2 it was written for (tkn solves this having the script vendored)
• It uses ncurses instead of direct printing. This gets it some nice behaviour like autoredrawing when resizing windows or changing font size
• It aims to have the code better split and organized, in order to allow better extensibility and an easier time when adding features in the future. This is, however, a claim to be proofed.

Install tkn2 if you haven't, and run the generator to create a new deck:

$ gem install tkn2
$ tkn2 new 'My slides'

This will create a directory called my_slides/ which will contain your deck in the file my_slides.rb:

require 'tkn2'

Tkn2.deck do
  # here go your slides
end

To run the deck:

$ tkn2 show ruby my_slides.rb

Each command generates a slide. These are the commands available:

Generates a slide with the given text, centered line by line.

center <<-EOS
  Tkn2
  Less is more
EOS

Generates a slide with the given text, centered as a whole (useful for bulleted lists).

block <<-EOS
  This is why Tkn2 is cool:
    * Reason number 1
    * Reason number 2
EOS

Highlights the code given (using pygments.rb and pygments) and displays it centered.

code <<-RUBY
  puts 'hello'
RUBY

Generates a slide with the section title centered and proceeds with the contained slides.

section 'This is a section' do
  center 'Slide n. 1'
  center 'Slide n. 2'
end

See the examples/ directory.

Apart from that, it's Ruby! So you're not limited to use string literals to generate the content and you can do whatever you want (read from the network, make calculations, etc.).

These are the keys you can use to navigate the deck:

• Down, Right, Enter, Space, Page Down, N: next slide
• Up, Left, Backspace, Page Up, P: previous slide
• Home: first slide
• Q: quit

I'm writing Tkn2 as a way to experiment. This may make the roadmap a bit strange, as I'll be trying to bring to the terminal the most features common in graphical presentation software, even when it will be difficult and not very practical in many cases.

That said:

• (Auto)reload [1]
• Images [1]
• Better control of overflow (currently the deck crashes if the content doesn't fit in the screen). I'm playing with the idea of having scroll, something usually not present in graphical presentation software and that can be useful to present code without using a tiny font size
• Colors and themes
• Plugin system. More as an exercise, I want to try to keep the core small and simple and implement features as plugins
• A way to compose slides with more than one element. Tools to generate content (ASCII art diagrams, etc.)
• Speaker's notes (with next slide, etc.). The only practical way of doing this I see is implementing a server and having two different clients. This client-server mode is an interesting feature in itself, for remote presentations through the network

[1] Already present in tkn.

• Xavi, for the great inspiration and brilliant hack

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request

Released under the MIT License, Copyright (c) 2013 Sergio Gil.