Enhance Your Command Line Presentations with mdp

Once upon a time, in the vast world of developers and technology enthusiasts, there was a simple and effective tool for creating command-line presentations using markdown syntax.

Here’s what a presentation created with mdp looks like:

I’ll tell you, this magical tool called mdp will revolutionize your presentations. For those unfamiliar with Markdown, it’s a lightweight markup language that allows you to write formatted text with simple, easy-to-read syntax. You can use it to create documents, articles, notes, and now presentations! That’s powerful!

To get started, you need to have the dependencies libncurses5-dev and libncursesw5-dev installed. You can compile mdp as follows:

git clone https://github.com/visit1985/mdp.git cd mdp make make install

mdp is also available in the repositories of certain Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu, and on macOS. You can install it on macOS with the brew command:

brew install mdp

Or on Ubuntu like this:

apt-get install mdp

Keep in mind that to use mdp’s colors in your terminal, you’ll need to ensure that the TERM variable is set correctly:

export TERM=xterm-256color

Now, let’s talk a little about the features of mdp. Horizontal bars are used as slide separators, and the tool supports basic Markdown formatting such as headings, code formatting, lists, links, bold, italics, underline, and more.

If you want to know more about the different tags and options, I recommend consulting the sample.md file.

Once your file is ready, you can launch it with the following command:

mdp sample.md

Navigating the slides is simple! You can use keyboard arrows, the spacebar, the Enter key, backspace, Page Up, Page Down, Home, End, numbers 1-9, ‘r’, and ‘q’.

Sometimes you may need to create a debug version of mdp. In this case, simply execute the following command: make DEBUG=1. This will allow you to quickly resolve issues when developing your presentations.

Now I’m sure you’re wondering, “Why choose mdp for my presentations?” Well, the answer is simple: it’s lightweight, portable, and incredibly convenient. You will no longer need heavy and complicated applications like PowerPoint or Keynote to create clear and effective presentations to share with your colleagues, your friends, or even your grandmother!

You can simply open a terminal, write a few lines of Markdown, and voilà, an impressive presentation is born!

There’s a great saying: “Less is More,” and that’s precisely what mdp embodies. By using simple, lightweight tools like mdp, you can focus on the content and consistency of your presentations while avoiding unnecessary distractions and complications.

Discover mdp here.