Over this past weekend, I wrote a lot of code. On Monday I was supposed to demo it in an organized way that would showcase the flow of the program I was working on. I see this done by others all the time with tools like PowerPoint, using lots of screen shots of running code alongside some text explaining at high-level what is going on to guide the speaker through his presentation.

I've done this myself many times before, but I almost always end up changing something between initially completing the task and presenting the slides, forcing me to re-run the programs by hand, take new screenshots, and import them into my slides. Wouldn't it be nice if the slides just ran my program while I was presenting? What if I didn't have to make all these slides in PowerPoint or OmniGraffle just to showcase some quick developer output in an organized, sequenced, flow-controlled way?

That's where slide.sh comes in. There's not really any magic to it, but it standardizes a practice I've used numerous times over the years by echo'ing formatted text, running some commands with pre-formatted output, and organizing thought by presenting things in a controlled fashion without throwing a huge blob of text up all at once.

Browse the source on Github

slide.sh

Spend less time making slides

What is it?

slide.sh is a small, basic, kludgy, hackish, ghetto slide maker that will execute entirely inside of your shell.

There are no graphics, no transitions or effects, no cool line drawing abilities, or anything like that. Seriously bro, its a shell script.

Purpose

What slide.sh provides is the ability to show simulated pages of ASCII text inside of your terminal. An advantage to this is that you, as some sort of programmer, won't have to take a bunch of screen caps or copy / paste text into some full-featured slide creation program to demo the core functionality of your executable program in a clean and organized way while notating certain things and controlling the flow of your presentation.

Features

• Pre-formatted text will render exactly as it was produced
• Text centering for writing titles, page markers, etc.
• Slide pausing to help demonstrate multi-step processes
• Slide separators (horizontal rule)

Uses

Some useful things I've done with slide.sh / can think of for it:

• Demo REST API calls using cURL
• Demo command-line tool functionality
• Write some markdown-style slides for basic presentations

Requirements

• A bash shell
• tput

Example

The above demo was created from the following shell script, which just sources slide.sh and then makes some slides.

#!/bin/bash
. ./slide.sh

slide <<EOF
!!center
slide.sh
Spend less time making slides
https://github.com/ryanuber/slide.sh
EOF

slide <<EOF
By default, text appears exactly as you entered it.
EOF

slide <<EOF
!!center
Centering Text

In any of your slides, you can insert a line that reads '!!center'. This
will cause text in the following lines to be centered.

!!nocenter
You can use '!!nocenter' at any time to stop centering lines
EOF

slide <<EOF
!!center
You can use backticks or dollar-parenthesis to execute commands inside
of the slide, like this:

Today is \$(date +%A)

evaluates to...

Today is $(date +%A)
EOF

slide <<EOF
!!center
You can also use variables for repetetive information, like this:

The current working directory is \$PWD

evaluates to...

The current working directory is $PWD
EOF

slide <<EOF
!!center
You can press 'q' at any time to quit gracefully out of the slide deck
EOF

slide 'Check out this custom action message' <<EOF
!!center
You can pass a string argument to 'slide' to define a custom action message,
rather than the default 'next slide' message.
EOF

slide <<EOF
You can add pauses inside of each slide for demonstrating things. You can
advance slide rendering by pressing return. For example, in this slide, there
should be a pause immediately after this sentence.
!!pause
Did it pause? Cool! It should pause one more time following this sentence.
!!pause
You can use !!pause as many times as you'd like.
EOF

slide <<EOF
!!center
Separators

You can separate parts of a slide by using '!!sep' on a line of its own.
!!sep
It is useful for packing multiple thoughts or ideas into a single slide.
!!sep
You could also use it to create a separated header at the top of each slide.
You can add as many separators as you want.
EOF

slide 'Only one more slide to go! ->' <<EOF
!!center

Putting it all together

!!sep

This slide demonstrates all of the functionality working together.
!!pause


I'll show you the time from a few different places around the world.
!!pause
!!nocenter

!!sep
   California      $(TZ=America/Los_Angeles date)
   Panama          $(TZ=America/Panama date)
   Virgin Islands  $(TZ=America/Virgin date)
   Tahiti          $(TZ=Pacific/Tahiti date)
   Athens          $(TZ=Europe/Athens date)
!!sep

!!pause

!!center
Putting slides together is super-fast and easy!
EOF

slide 'End of slides - Press enter to quit' <<EOF
!!center
...And that's all you need to know!
EOF