Vimdeck

VIM as a presentation tool

News

Vimdeck now uses redcarpet to parse and render markdown!

I've cleaned up the code significantly. So those of you who like more features in Vimdeck can fork and pull-request your buns off.

Installation

Install a markdown syntax highlighting plugin for VIM. (I recommend tpope/vim-markdown)

Install the VIM plugin SyntaxRange.

gem install vimdeck

If you have problems getting RMagick to install, try installing ImageMagick explicitly first. You may also need MagickWand and Ruby Development tools (libmagickwand-dev and ruby-dev respectively on Ubuntu).

Note: if you're on Mac OS Sierra, you may need to run the following command to get RMagick/vimdeck to install:

brew install imagemagick@6
brew link imagemagick@6 --force
gem install vimdeck

Also, if you're getting errors about a missing pkg-config, doublecheck that you have pkg-config installed:

brew install pkg-config

Usage

Write your slides in a markdown file (See below for details on limited markdown syntax)
Run vimdeck <file_name.md> and it will generate a file for each slide and open them in VIM

VIM Script

Vimdeck will also provide a script file that will set up keybindings for you.

PageUp/Left go backwards
PageDown/Right go forward
Q closes presentation

A Note about VIM

This is a tool meant for VIM users. In other words, it is not a VIM plugin — it's a script that converts a plain text document into multiple files.

The only hard dependency is SyntaxRange.

Other than that you may need some syntax highlighting plugins to handle the code syntax highlighting. vim-scripts/ingo-library may be required for syntax highlighting.

A Note About Markdown

Slides are separated by 2 newlines in a row.

Example:

# Slide 1

- has some
- really important
- information


# Slide 2

Is less important

Vimdeck uses redcarpet to parse its markdown and implements a custom renderer for things like ascii art. It uses a very small subset of markdown. List of items supported:

h1s
h2s
images
fenced code blocks

That's it. The point of Markdown is that it's human-readable. Other stuff like (un)ordered lists, block quotes, indented code blocks, etc. will be displayed just as they were written.

Fenced code blocks look like this:

```javascript
   this.is = 'code'
```

Highlighting Syntax

Vimdeck also supports "highlighting" parts of a slide. This is an experimental feature and needs more testing.

Use {~ unimportant_text_here ~} to "unhighlight" portions of a slide:

# Slide Title

{~- Unimportant bullet~}
- Important bullet
{~- Really unimportant bullet~}

This allows you to create multiple versions of the same slide but with different parts highlighted. Which is something I like to use often when presenting code snippets.

Why Ruby?

Additionally, I want to point out that I realize that it's odd to have a VIM-based tool and not write it as a VIM script. Ruby was my language of choice only because the ascii art dependencies were implemented as ruby gems. Plus, I ♥ ruby.