DeckWerk

DeckWerk is an opinionated cross-platform what-you-see-is-what-you-get slide editor by Vincent Sitzmann.

Deck as in slide deck, and Werk as in the German word that means "a work (of art, literature, etc)", a factory, or a structure.

Website: deckwerk.org

I designed DeckWerk to bring the ability to create and present polished talks to Linux. It is optimized for presentations centered on video and image content, with animation, tables, plotting, templating, and similar features reduced to the minimum.

DeckWerk is intended for research talks, lectures, demos, and other presentations in which the visual material is the substance.

Watch the demo on YouTube.

Installing

Download the installer for your system from deckwerk.org or the latest release:

• macOS — the .dmg for Apple Silicon (mac-arm64) or Intel (mac-x64). Open it and drag DeckWerk into Applications. Homebrew users can brew install --cask vsitzmann/tap/deckwerk instead.
• Windows — the setup.exe. It is not signed yet, so Windows may stop it at first: choose More info, then Run anyway.
• Linux (x64) — the .AppImage (allow it to run as a program, then double-click it), the .deb for Debian and Ubuntu, or the .tar.gz.

Updating — DeckWerk never updates, or even checks, on its own. Choose DeckWerk menu → Check for Updates…: if a newer release exists, the macOS, Windows and AppImage builds show what is new and update after you confirm, restarting when you say so. The .deb does not replace itself, and neither does a Flatpak: for those the menu item opens the release page.

From source — you will need Node.js 22 or newer, Python 3.10 or newer, and Git:

git clone https://github.com/vsitzmann/deckwerk.git
cd deckwerk
npm ci
npm run dist

The platform-specific installer lands in release/. See docs/BUILDING.md for platform-specific details and for running DeckWerk directly without packaging it first.

Why DeckWerk?

Most presentation software doesn't run on Linux. Web solutions such as Google Slides have minimal video support.

DeckWerk starts from a different set of assumptions:

• Linux should be a first-class platform for authoring and presenting.
• Videos and images should be easy to work with, supporting cropping, trimming, effects, and more.
• An AI agent should be able to edit the same presentation as a person.
• Starting a collaborative session should not require creating accounts or uploading a talk to a third-party service.

These assumptions make DeckWerk opinionated. It is not trying to reproduce every feature of PowerPoint or Keynote. It is trying to make a particular kind of visual, media-rich presentation easy to create and collaborate on in trusted networks and tailnets such as labs or companies.

Design principles

Cross-platform

It has to work on Linux :)

Video is a first-class object

Drag and drop video onto a slide. Crop it, trim it, adjust its appearance, and present it without leaving DeckWerk.

DeckWerk auto-transcodes videos and images into compatible formats.

Native agent integration

DeckWerk is designed so that AI agents can create and edit presentations directly. It does not run or own an agent account: for a local presentation, the Agent… button gives you its real deck folder and no server is involved. In a browser collaboration session, the same button copies a prompt that tells your agent how to mirror the remote live deck folder onto your machine and keep it in sync; the agent sets the mirror up itself. Only Node is needed for that remote bridge.

In both cases the authoring loop is the same: run slide-agent context, export or create an HTML file under edit/, then edit and save it. DeckWerk compiles that HTML into ordinary editable slide objects, applies the save as one named undoable change, and shows it in History. JavaScript-driven content is explicitly staged as a web element; titles, captions, and other non-interactive content remain normal editable objects.

Effortless collaboration on trusted networks

A collaborative session can run from a laptop or a headless server. Anyone on the same trusted local network—or the same tailnet—can join and begin editing.

Participants see one another’s selections, cursors, and edits in real time.

This mode is intentionally designed for trusted networks. It is not a public document-sharing service and should not be exposed directly to the open internet.

Headless collaboration server

Run on a lab machine or team server, DeckWerk works much like Google Slides: a feature-complete, collaborative deck editor in the browser, with no accounts and nothing to install for collaborators. Point it at a folder of presentations; everyone who opens the address gets a file picker, then the full editor, with live cursors, selections and edits from everyone else.

[!CAUTION] Run the headless server behind a tailnet. Never expose it to the internet. It has no passwords or user accounts: anyone who can reach its port can open, edit and download every presentation it serves. Don't forward the port, open it in a cloud firewall, put it behind a public reverse proxy, or publish it with tailscale funnel. See Setting up a tailnet for a step-by-step setup.

From a source checkout (see Installing):

npm ci
npm run collab -- /path/to/shared-decks

The server listens on port 5800 and prints every address it can be reached at. Choose who can reach it with --host:

Reachable from	Command
The local network (and the tailnet, if the machine is on one)	npm run collab -- /path/to/shared-decks
The tailnet only	npm run collab -- /path/to/shared-decks --host "$(tailscale ip -4)"
The tailnet only, over HTTPS with per-person access control	npm run collab -- /path/to/shared-decks --host 127.0.0.1 --access [email protected]plus tailscale serve --bg --https=443 http://127.0.0.1:5800
This machine only	npm run collab -- /path/to/shared-decks --host 127.0.0.1

Each subfolder of /path/to/shared-decks that holds a DeckWerk presentation shows up in the picker; ordinary folders nest them. The server cannot read or write outside that folder. From the browser, people can open, create, rename, move and import presentations, present them, and download a copy. Use --port 5900 to pick another port.

The server holds the authoritative copy of each open presentation and saves every change straight back into its folder, so images and videos stay ordinary files on disk. Don't open the same presentation in the desktop app while the server is running. Press Ctrl+C to stop it; open presentations are saved before it exits.

Tailnet only. Binding to the machine's Tailscale address hides the server from the local network. Collaborators open http://<machine-name>:5800. Binding to loopback and publishing through tailscale serve adds HTTPS, and with --access each person's tailnet login becomes their identity, so a presentation can be private, shared with named people, or view-only. There are no passwords: tailnet membership is the authentication. Never expose this setup through tailscale funnel.

Agents. Every collaborator can bring their own agent, such as Claude Code or Codex. Agent… in the browser toolbar copies a prompt to paste into the agent. The agent then starts a small bridge (it needs only Node 22) that mirrors the live presentation into a folder on their machine. The agent's edits reach everyone within a second or two and show up under its name in History. Nothing runs on the server on anyone's behalf. --no-local-agents turns this off.

What DeckWerk is good at

DeckWerk is particularly suited to:

• Research talks and technical presentations
• Video-heavy project demos
• Lectures built around visual examples
• Talks containing many images, clips, diagrams, and animations
• Presentations collaboratively edited by people and AI agents

File format

DeckWerk presentations are stored locally as folders containing the presentation and its media. Videos remain ordinary video files and images remain ordinary image files.

A talk does not need to be uploaded to a service before it can be edited, presented, shared, or archived.

DeckWerk can also export a presentation for playback in a web browser, providing a portable fallback when presenting from another machine.

Project status

DeckWerk is in alpha, under active development. I already use it to author and deliver real presentations, but its interfaces and file format may continue to evolve.

Development

DeckWerk is an open-source Electron application under the MIT license.

• docs/BUILDING.md — building from source on any platform
• docs/RELEASING.md — how signed releases are cut
• AGENTS.md — architecture, authoring model, and testing notes

Name

DeckWerk combines “deck,” as in a slide deck, with the German word Werk: a work, creation, or craft.