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vortex_ape
Hey, author here! Just wanted to add that you can write your slides using Markdown (most of its features are supported).

Also reposting my comment from the asciimatics post that was here yesterday:

I made this on top of asciimatics, which is awesome! I had a lot of fun making this thanks to all the effects asciimatics already has.

I was also able to extend an internal asciimatics class to add a feature for pre-recorded playable code blocks. It lets you play code in your terminal presentation like someone's typing it! You can learn more about it here: https://present.readthedocs.io/en/latest/codio.html

vortex_ape
PS: I've been wanting to build this ever since I watched Brandon Rhodes' North Bay Python 2017 keynote! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrMnmLyYjU8

It's a talk about (in Brandon's words) ASCII art animation, software architecture, the mysteries of UNIX terminal settings, and the glories of Plain Text. You should totally check it out!

swyx
i gotta say, every time i see a bay area python meetup on youtube, it's always super high quality. as someone who doesnt live in the bay area, i am very jealous. please pass along my compliments to organizers and i wish i could replicate it in my city.
TedDoesntTalk
How did you do the matrix raining code in the demo? I did not see it in the examples. I use an mp4 of that as a screen saver but would love it in terminal instead!
vortex_ape
You can use the matrix effect by adding `<!-- effect=matrix -->` to the top of your slide! :)

These effects are supported right now: fireworks, explosions, stars, matrix, plasma. I plan to add more asciimatics effects soon!

ksaj
I'm hoping for <-- effect=gol --> for a Game of Life simulation. For whatever reason, it comes up in my talks often. It seems I exude geekness acme whenever I talk about hacking and self-propagating code.
m3at
Here is how to do it with a few lines of bash:

  function matrix () {
      echo -e "\e[1;40m"
      clear
      while :; do
          echo $LINES $COLUMNS $(( $RANDOM % $COLUMNS)) $(( $RANDOM % 72 ))
          sleep 0.05
      done|awk '{
          letters="abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789あいうえおかきくけこさしすせそたちつてとなにぬねのはひふへほまみむめもやゆよらりるれろわをん@#$%^&*()";
          c=$4; letter=substr(letters,c,1);a[$3]=0;for (x in a) {o=a[x];a[x]=a[x]+1; printf "\033[%s;%sH\033[2;32m%s",o,x,letter;
          printf "\033[%s;%sH\033[1;37m%s\033[0;0H",a[x],x,letter;if (a[x] >= $1) { a[x]=0; } }
      }'
  }
swyx
could i ask about more details on shipping this? what made you start working on it? how long did you work on it to an initial state? have you had any practical work-related side benefits of doing something like this, or is it pure hobby?
vortex_ape
I started working on this at the Recurse Center two weeks ago.

As for practical work-related side benefits, I've neither had my open-source work weigh in on the hiring process (as everyone still asks algorithms/data structures questions) nor earned much money through it. But I love building open-source tools that would be useful for people, including me (I used `present` for a talk some days ago), so you could say it's just a hobby at this point.

swyx
oh wow, very nice! well congrats on shipping this and i'm sure the exercise will come in useful in unexpected ways!
vortex_ape
Thanks! An unrelated question: how do you track HN comments? (since you replied to this one so quickly!)
swyx
i used to use a hn comment reply notification tool at my old job, but no this one i just happened to check my replies at the right time
BOOSTERHIDROGEN
I cant running this apps

  \appdata\local\programs\python\python38\lib\runpy.py", line 194, in _run_module_as_main
    return _run_code(code, main_globals, None,
szszrk
Hey! It's super cool, but can't work it out how to run this on a few environemnts. Tried Ubuntu and centos, always get ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'dataclasses'.

Centos 8.2, Python 3.6.8, present Version: 0.4.0, pip 9.0.3. Tried with global and user install in pip. Not really a python dev, more of a user :)

szszrk
I just found some issues on it on github, will try to sort it out, sorry for calling here first, just expected all dependencies to be there and didn't realized "dataclasses" could be a project name!:)
catmistake
Those special f/x are really slick. Always nice to see new Terminal development.
JakeWesorick
Nice! Something similar but maybe not so extreme is Deck Set. https://www.deckset.com/

Write markdown and it does the design for you.

vortex_ape
I love how DeckSet looks but it only works on macOS :\",
lazzlazzlazz
DeckSet is great, but is quite limited in terms of allowing theme customization. If they allowed themes to be modified directly with CSS — or better, YAML/TOML/JSOn, that'd be excellent.

I've been looking very closely at Marp[1], which is a engineer-focused solution to this.

[^1] https://github.com/marp-team/marp

captn3m0
Used it last week for a presentation. Loved it.
vortex_ape
Thanks again! I loved that presentation! Looking forward to a longer one :D
andy99
Made me think of this that I have used previously: http://suso.suso.org/xulu/Shellshow

I had played with writing a pandoc filter that would add formatting escape sequences based on markdown, your tool does a better job than where I got to.

One thing I want in a tool like this is to be able to display ascii charts like from gnuplot, which is why I liked the simplicity of Shellshow. I will have to dig in to see if this is possible, if not I expect it would be easy to add.

vortex_ape
Thanks for pointing me to Shellshow, I hadn't heard of it before, it looks cool! I'll look into it in detail sometime this week and see if I can add some of its features to `present`.

> One thing I want in a tool like this is to be able to display ascii charts like from gnuplot, which is why I liked the simplicity of Shellshow. I will have to dig in to see if this is possible, if not I expect it would be easy to add.

I've thought about adding charting features too! Asciimatics supports barcharts: https://asciimatics.readthedocs.io/en/stable/asciimatics.htm... and lets you extend classes to build other types of charts too.

Would you like to open an issue and describe this feature a bit in detail? https://github.com/vinayak-mehta/present/issues For example, what should the API look like, should it pick up data from a csv file and load it up into a barchart etc. I would love to work on this when I find time!

mbo
There's a major missed opportunity here - you can create codeblocks but there's no way to _run_ the codeblocks.

https://github.com/marconilanna/REPLesent, a similar tool for Scala, supports this by pressing `r` on any slide - all code will be evaluated into the REPL.

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