Why SliDesk?

SliDesk is a contraction of Slide and Desk. It is an open-source tool for both slide creation and conference presentation: write your talk in Markdown, generate it, and present it in the browser.

The short version

You want plain Markdown, native internationalisation, and file includes — without standing up a Vue/Vite project to get them.

That is the gap SliDesk fills. Markdown-first tools stay minimal and leave i18n and includes to plugins or preprocessors. Component-framework tools give you power, but hand you a front-end app to maintain in exchange. SliDesk keeps the single-binary, single-Markdown-file experience and ships the two features that matter once a talk grows past a handful of slides.

Compared to the alternatives

To be precise about where SliDesk actually differs:

• Multi-language from one source is the outlier. Marp, Slidev, and Reveal.js have no built-in equivalent — the usual answer is "duplicate the deck" or "write a preprocessor".
• Includes exist elsewhere, but they cost you the project. Slidev imports one file per src: frontmatter block, and you get that only inside a Vue/Vite app. SliDesk includes a file or a whole directory with a single !include() line, from a plain Markdown file and a single binary.

So the claim is not "SliDesk does more than everyone". It is that Markdown-first + native i18n + directory-level includes, with no front-end project to maintain, is a combination you cannot currently get anywhere else.

Why native i18n matters

The usual workaround for a bilingual talk is to duplicate the deck: talk-en/ and talk-fr/. Every layout tweak, every corrected typo, every updated screenshot then has to be applied twice, and the two copies drift apart before the second run of the talk.

SliDesk keeps one source of truth. Slides hold $$variables$$; the words live in en.lang.json, fr.lang.json, and so on, next to your main file. One file carries "default": true for the fallback, and --lang fr picks another at present time.

slidesk my-talk        # default language
slidesk -l fr my-talk  # same slides, same theme, same speaker notes

Translation is applied after includes are resolved, so variables work inside every included file. See the internationalisation reference for the details.

Why native includes matter

A one-hour talk in a single Markdown file is unpleasant to edit and unpleasant to review. !include() splits it by section:

# $$title$$

!include(slides/01-intro.md)
!include(slides/02-demo.md)
!include(slides/99-questions.md)

You can also include a whole directory with a single line. Files are gathered recursively and sorted alphabetically — subdirectories are walked automatically, so the slide order follows the natural file / folder tree:

slides/
├── 01-intro.md
├── 02-demo.md
├── 03-advanced/
│   ├── 01-feature-a.md
│   ├── 02-feature-b.md
│   └── 03-feature-c.md
└── 99-questions.md

# $$title$$

!include(slides)

This produces slides in order: 01-intro, 02-demo, 03-advanced/01-feature-a, 03-advanced/02-feature-b, 03-advanced/03-feature-c, 99-questions. Reordering is just renaming files, and the whole slides/ directory can be shared across talks. See the includes reference.

Everything else

• Server with live reload via WebSocket
• Presentation view with keyboard, touch, and swipe navigation
• Speaker view showing current and next slide, timer(s), and notes
• File watcher — edit files, the browser updates in real time
• Image management with responsive sizing and captions
• Theme system with CSS custom properties
• Plugin system for front-end scripts, back-end routes, and WebSocket handlers
• Component system for custom HTML transformations
• Template system with named blocks and reusable layouts
• Presentation generator (slidesk create)
• Telnet server to present from any terminal
• Hub at slidesk.link to share addons

Philosophy

Modularity is essential. SliDesk must be lightweight but expandable as needed.

Using Bun means we can ship a standalone binary with no external dependencies — nothing to install, nothing to keep up to date in a package.json you did not want.

Why a new tool?

• It is fun to create something
• A tool that does only the minimum
• A very small, lightweight tool
• Permissive — embed raw HTML, Vue, React, Svelte, etc. without restrictions

Links

• Source: https://github.com/slidesk/slidesk
• Hub: https://slidesk.link
• VSCode extension: https://github.com/slidesk/vscode-sdf-language