Slidemd

A fast and lightweight CLI tool to present your Markdown. (Powered by reveal.js and express.js)

Why?

reveal.js is a fantastic presentation tool with built-in Markdown support (and many other features), only it can be a little hassle to present external Markdown files. After trying out reveal-md, which is also great, I personally find it a little heavy.

And most of the time when I present, I'd like to reference some local images in my markdown.

So here comes Slidemd. It's tiny, and fully-featured.

Installation

npm i -g slidemd
# or
yarn add -g slidemd

The installation can be skipped if you're using npx.

Usage

slidemd /path/to/your/slides.md
# or, for npx users
npx slidemd path/to/your/slides.md

Then your default browser will automatically open http://localhost:8080.

Happy presenting!

Reference local images

Running slidemd will also serve the the files within the current working directory, so you can reference images alongside your markdown.

For example, suppose the following directory:

$ tree .
.
├── my-slides.md
├── image1.png
└── image2.png

inside my-slides.md, you can reference image1.png and image2.png like this:

# My awesome slides

![](image1.png)

---

![](image2.png)

CLI options

For simplicity's sake, Slidemd doesn't feature a load of CLI options, only some "must-have" ones.

Run slidemd -h to list the supported CLI options:

$ slidemd -h
Usage: slidemd [options] <file>

A fast and lightweight CLI tool to present your Markdown.

Options:
  -V, --version                    output the version number
  -p, --port <port>                port number of the local server (default: "8080")
  -t, --theme <theme>              theme of the slides (default: "black")
  -o, --optionsFile <optionsFile>  JSON file of reveal.js config and additional options
  -c, --cssFile <cssFile>          CSS file of custom styles to a specified theme
  -h, --help                       display help for command

--theme

alias: -t required: ✗ default: black

--theme specifies a built-in theme of your slides. You can pass a CSS file via --cssFile option to add some custom styles to your slides.

If a custom theme is what you need, you'll have to follow reveal.js's official guide.

--port

alias: -p required: ✗ default: 8080

--port determines the port number of the local server that Slidemd creates after running slidemd.

--optionsFile

alias: -o required: ✗

reveal.js exposes a wide range of customizable config options to customize presentation behaviors, and Slidemd supports them all.

To configure reveal.js options, specify them (like progress, controls, and so on) in a JSON file via the --optionsFile CLI option.

slidemd /path/to/your/slides.md -o /path/to/your/optionsFile.json

In additional to reveal.js built-in configurations, there are some extra options you can put in the JSON file:

Config option	Default value	Description
separator	^\r?\n---\r?\n$	regex for horizontal slides
separatorVertical	^\r?\n--\r?\n$	regex for vertical slides
notes	^notes?:	regex for speaker view notes

--cssFile

alias: -c required: ✗

--cssFile specifies a local CSS file to add some more custom styles to your selected theme.

reveal.js

Here are some notes on how Slidemd configures and initializes reveal.js.

Plugins

Slidemd enables the following reveal.js plugins:

• RevealMarkdown - that's why Slidemd even exists, isn't it?
• RevealHighlight - how could we hackers not show code in our slides?
• RevealNotes - sometimes you need tips when presenting, that's fine.

Sorry but it's not possible to customize plugins using Slidemd, if you need more fine-grained customization, please checkout reveal.js's official guide.

Markdown

Slidemd uses reveal.js's data- attributes under the hood to specify how a Markdown file's slides are delimited.

The default values are:

• data-separator - ^\r?\n---\r?\n$
• data-separator-vertical - ^\r?\n--\r?\n$

To customize, see --optionsFile for more details.

Speaker notes

RevealNotes plugin is used for speaker view, and the regex to determine notes is:

• data-separator-notes - ^notes?:

To customize, see --optionsFile for more details.

NodeJS API

Slidemd also exposes a NodeJS API.

import slidemd from 'slidemd';

// Create a local server to present your Markdown file
slidemd(
  options: {
    // file path, will be resolved relative to `options.cwd`
    file: string;
    // current working dir, defaults to `process.cwd()`
    cwd?: string;
    port?: string;
    theme?: string;
    // options JSON file, same as `--optionsFile` CLI option
    optionsFile?: string;
    // CSS file, same as `--cssFile` CLI option
    cssFile?: string;
  },
  callback?: () => void
);

License

MIT