mdeck

What you can do with it

Start from what you have

/write-slides Rebuild lecture-03.pptx and my notes in notes.md as a
20-minute talk for second-year students. Keep the figures, split the
crowded slides, and start with a poll.

Old PowerPoint decks, PDFs, Word documents, papers and rough notes all work. mdeck ships a write-slides skill for Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Copilot, Gemini and any other assistant. It reads your material, keeps your content and pictures, rebuilds it in the layouts and looks your folder provides, writes speaker notes from your text, and checks the result with mdeck. Then you keep asking: “split slide 4”, “use a dark look”, “you left out the table on page 3”.

A presentation is a text file

mdeck slides are Markdown, which is close to the native language of AI assistants: they write it all day, so they write good slides without operating any slide software. And it stays plain text you can read, review and change yourself:

---
theme: neue
meta:
  title: Enzyme kinetics
  author: Alex Morgan
---

---
:::meta
layout: title
:::
# Enzyme kinetics
## How fast, and why

---
# Rate depends on substrate

- Michaelis–Menten describes saturation
- $K_m$ is the half-saturation point

:::notes
Ask who has seen the curve before.
:::

Saved as talk.md, mdeck run talk.md turns it into a slide deck with a title slide, a content slide, a theme, and your notes in the presenter view. The preview reloads whenever you or the assistant change the file.

One file, any look

The same slide file rendered with built-in themes and themes from the theme repository. Change one line in the settings, or pick from the presenter view, and the whole deck repaints.

Try it yourself: the docs home page embeds a live deck with a theme switcher.

Install

You need Node.js 22 or newer:

npm install -g mdeck
mdeck --help

Installed mdeck from the FHNW GitLab registry before? Switch with npm uninstall -g @tilman.schieber/mdeck, then install as above.

Working from a clone instead? See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Then teach your assistant about mdeck:

mdeck skill --install claude   # or codex, cursor, copilot, gemini; --print for anything else

See Work with an AI assistant for briefing tips, follow-up requests and what to check before presenting.

First steps

mdeck new                    # no assistant? answer a few questions, get a starter file
mdeck run talk.md            # launch page: present, edit, send and check; reloads on save
mdeck run talk.md --network  # also reachable from phones, e.g. for a poll
mdeck run talk.md --server   # present from an iPad on any network, through your server
mdeck build talk.md --reader # dist/ reader folder to host, notes removed
mdeck send talk.md           # one file to email, with a PDF inside

以上为 README 的开头部分。其余内容请阅读原文。 查看完整 README ↗