from Hacker News

Cleaver – 30-second slideshows for hackers

by iheredia on 4/27/17, 1:58 PM with 49 comments

  • by prezjordan on 4/27/17, 2:58 PM

    Hi HN! Cool to see this posted here.

    I made this in college because I would always make slides last minute before class presentations or talks at my school's CS club, and fiddling with google slides/powerpoint seemed like overkill. I hope you find it useful as I have over the years.

    I've attempted to rewrite it 5 or 6 times based on whatever cool technology I was distracted with, but never merged anything upstream (Spectacle https://github.com/FormidableLabs/spectacle is already a wonderful React solution).

    A couple other folks maintain cleaver now (they're great), but lemme know if you have any questions!

  • by tedmiston on 4/27/17, 7:34 PM

    Cool project.

    Dropbox Paper recently added a similar feature called Presentation mode. It treats --- as slide breaks and intelligently does font sizing of headers, recognizes headers as "soft slides", etc. It takes very little to no effort to go from doc to minimal presentation.

    https://www.dropbox.com/help/paper/presentation-mode

  • by djsumdog on 4/27/17, 4:17 PM

    I use Reveal.js for my presentations. The standard docs do have you putting all the slides in one big file, but I re-used slides between presentations so I created a little build systems with sets of slides, as well as individual slides, for different talk types:

    https://github.com/bigsense/presentations

  • by nxc18 on 4/27/17, 2:56 PM

    This looks great. I love the simplicity on mobile and it has some nice touches (e.g. top progress bar).

    I'm working on a project that needs something similar to this - embedded html presentations - but I'm faced with a problem I haven't found an easy solution to yet.

    Markdown is great if there is just text or maybe only an image and text, but it falls down pretty hard with oddly shaped images or multiple images.

    I'm considering making a js script to reformat things to look reasonable (e.g. Two column text + image with a tall image). Is there anything like this that exists currently?

  • by cbhl on 4/27/17, 2:27 PM

    If you're interested in this, you may also like reveal.js, which backs slides.com:

    http://lab.hakim.se/reveal-js/

    (previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6450223)

  • by ams6110 on 4/27/17, 5:49 PM

    These kinds of tools have been around forever. There are probably literally hundreds of ways do do slides from plain text. An older one is MagicPoint[1].

    Nicely done though.

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MagicPoint

  • by yogsototh on 4/27/17, 3:09 PM

    Shameless plug. I made a very similar tool a few time ago:

    https://github.com/yogsototh/mkdocs

    Mostly a very minimal script which use pandoc. From markdown generate presentations (html with reveal.js/pdf with beamer) and documents (html/pdf).

  • by ArlenBales on 4/27/17, 8:42 PM

    Based on the title, I genuinely thought this was a site that hosted 30 second slideshows for hackers. Something like "Learn X in Y time".

  • by zck on 4/27/17, 9:40 PM

    I have a similar project, but for presenting org files inside of Emacs: https://bitbucket.org/zck/zpresent.el .

    The benefit is that it's org files, so you have all your standard org features, like easily adding new items and reordering things. It also, unlike other org presentation modes, presents from inside Emacs.

  • by jsnathan on 4/27/17, 8:38 PM

    Another simple tool of this kind to try out is Marp [1]. It has a live preview, and slides are exported to PDF.

    [1]: https://yhatt.github.io/marp/

  • by poptartman on 4/27/17, 3:47 PM

    Forgive me if it's obvious, but I'm new to programming and I'm trying to understand how this works.

    I've been looking through the github repo for a while now and I can't find the code that is responsible for parsing the markdown syntax into the html tags which are rendered on the page. Can someone point me to where that logic is occuring?

  • by blipmusic on 4/27/17, 4:50 PM

    Md slides day? Nice to see another option. I use Keynote/Powerpoint only if I absolutely have to nowadays (collaboration). The simplicity of plain text -> slides really speaks to me.

    Here's another: https://remarkjs.com/

    There are even commercial apps, such as Deckset (macOS).

  • by thesephist on 4/27/17, 2:32 PM

    I wrote something like this when I was in high school because I got tired of powerpoint being hard to work with across platforms (Linux...). I ended up using it for a couple class presentations, which I enjoyed because it forces you to focus on content vs. unnecessary style and it's just a URL to link to instead of a maybe-compatible .pptx.

    HTML based, styled with CSS. Not quite markdown, but a parser would be quick to make, I guess? https://github.com/thesephist/tesseract

  • by dogas on 4/27/17, 7:59 PM

    Since it appears to be markdown slides day on HN, I am getting close to releasing a beta of Ultradeck (https://ultradeck.co). Currently the marketing site mentions that Ultradeck is a desktop app, but I have since pivoted and it will be a webapp. I am targeting a beta launch next month!

  • by zoom6628 on 4/29/17, 12:55 AM

    I really like this. Have messed with the other forms of this approach over the years but this looks like the simplest. My need is to create a tool that makes easier for people to quickly throw together presentations from some boilerplate and some code, screenshots, links etc. This looks like 80% of what i need. For anything more sophisticated i would use mkdocs which i already use. BTW i prefer to use typora for my md editing. Its (so far) the nicest tool with which to work in md directly on windows. I use MOU on osx, and downloading macdown today.

  • by pathsjs on 4/27/17, 3:36 PM

    If you want a little more customizability, make sure to try https://www.madoko.net/

  • by jtraffic on 4/27/17, 3:22 PM

    This is rad! I got so excited about reveal.js and webslides recently (http://lab.hakim.se/reveal-js/#/ and https://github.com/webslides/WebSlides) but this is superior in my view because of Markdown.

  • by obowersa on 4/27/17, 2:32 PM

    Another option in this space:

    https://github.com/regebro/hovercraft

    Always liked hovercraft as it makes impress.js much more usable. Will have to properly kick the tires on Cleaver

  • by diminoten on 4/27/17, 3:50 PM

    It's funny, another thing like this just showed up on /r/programming: https://github.com/gitpitch/gitpitch

  • by sleepychu on 4/27/17, 2:12 PM

    Neat, might give this a try next time I need to do a presentation.

    Presently I use tex for this.

  • by sametmax on 4/27/17, 9:28 PM

    Jupyter, does this, but better IMO. Not only you can create slide shows with markdown, but the code is executable and include code completion when your write it.

  • by magic_beans on 4/27/17, 3:27 PM

    This looks awesome! Clean and easy. I like it!!

  • by juanpabloaj on 4/27/17, 5:44 PM

  • by anotheryou on 4/27/17, 3:16 PM

    put some keywords in the title, I'll never find that bookmark again...

  • by kiflay on 4/28/17, 4:45 PM

    for some reason it is not working for me. I run "cleaver Desktop/{Name}/Presentation/testCleaver.md" but i can't see the basic.html output

  • by eptcyka on 4/27/17, 3:05 PM

    What has this got to do with hackers?

  • by blkhawk on 4/27/17, 2:21 PM

    I would try it but I am anti-node - sad