How to Create Lightweight Slideshow Presentations in Your Linux Terminal
Slideshow presentations are an essential and unavoidable part of corporate and academic life thanks to their ability to help you plan and structure the dissemination of information to your audience.
But snazzy graphics and transition effects can be a distraction from the core information, with the effort you put into making a visually appealing PowerPoint better spent elsewhere.
Slides is a terminal-based presentation tool for Linux that processes Markdown files—helping you to create and present slideshows without ever leaving your terminal!
Slideshows Are an Essential Business Tool
When you need to impart vital data or instructions to a group of disengaged and disinterested employees or students at 9 am on a Monday, nothing works better thanpresenting a slideshow.
It requires minimal participation from the audience, and you may organize your presentation in a structured, logical way. Unlike a video presentation, it’s easy to build breakpoints into a slideshow, so you can test your audience’s engagement as they yawn, stretch, and doodle on notepads.
You can enhance the value of a slideshow with handouts—allowing slides to be inwardly digested after the show is over.
Why Use a Terminal-Based Slideshow
A big drawback of traditional slideshows built using programs such as Microsoft PowerPoint or Google Slides is that they can be distracting for both audience and the author.
When putting a slideshow together, there’s a temptation to use background images to enliven the otherwise dull text. it’s possible to spend hours deciding on the correct font family, weight, and placement.
Is it better to have the first slide gently fade into the second, or to have the entire presentation progress by way of zooms, wipes, flips, and dissolve effects?
The result is often a mess of clutter that takes too long to create and nauseates viewers.
Slides helps you avoid all of these problems. The font is your terminal font, there are no distracting transitions, and while it is possible to display images if your terminal supports them, it’s not a primary feature.
Best of all, you create your slideshow using Markdown, a straightforward, easy-to-understand markup language, which can be rapidly mastered to produce beautiful and simple formatted text on Linux.
How to Install Slides on Linux
Slides is written in Google’s Go language, and you’ll need tohave Go installed on your systembefore you start.
If your system supports snap packages, you can easily install Go with:
Then, you can use Go to install Slides:
Slides is also present inthe Arch User Repository (AUR). To add it this way, enter:
While Slides is present in the Snap Store, if you install it using snap, you’ll run into problems when executing code. If you don’t plan on using this feature, you can install Slides as a snap with the following:
You’re now ready to create a slideshow.
Use Slides to Create an Awesome Terminal Slideshow
Creating a terminal-based slideshow is simple with Slides, and every directive to run the show can be contained within a single Markdown file. Here’swhy you should learn Markdowneven if you’re not using Slides.
To begin, use the nano text editor to create a new Markdown file:
In the file start writing the contents of your first slide, remembering to use standard Markdown conventions. Take advantage ofstandard Markdown featuressuch as headings, bold and italic text, bullet points, numbered lists, tables, code blocks, quotes, and more!
When you’re ready to move to the next slide, insert a triple dash on a new line.
As with all good presentations, it’s best to follow some basic guidelines, and to follow the KISS principle: Keep It Simple, Stupid.
In practice, this means not trying to ram a complete essay into the eyeballs of your audience.
You can start the slideshow by entering:
Slides also allows you to get up to some programmatic hi-jinks, and insert code blocks into your Markdown. Slides supports a wide variety of languages including JavaScript, Bash, Python, Elixir, and Go.
A code block is bracketed by two sets of three backticks, with the name of the language immediately following the first set.
To execute the code and show the result, just pressCtrl + E. If you want Slides to pre-process the code, wrap it in three tildes inside the code block, and change the location of the language. For instance:
…will display the current weather conditions in Chicago as part of the presentation.
For pre-processing to work, you’ll need to make the file executable before passing it to Slides:
Additional Slides Options
As slides are written in Markdown, you can use the front matter at the very beginning of the file to set additional configuration options.
This front matter is again surrounded by three hyphens. For example:
The “theme” option allows you to specify aGlamour themeto prettify and style your terminal.
Using “author” allows you to set an author for the slideshow. By default, the author is set to the current user.
With “date”, you can set the date. By default, this will be set to today’s date.
You can set up Slides to serve slideshows over SSH with:
You will be given a port to connect to. This is usually 53531. Connect to the show with:
Brush Up on Your Public Speaking
Creating a beautiful, concise, and engaging slideshow presentation can go a long way toward getting your message across. Still, your preparation will count for naught if your delivery skills aren’t up to scratch.
Learn to articulate your thoughts properly, and brush up on the best ways to address an audience with confidence, so your message goes across perfectly.
From building confidence to writing compelling scripts, these apps will help you master the art of public speaking.
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