Markdown Slides

Turning plain text into a presentation

Slide software like PowerPoint or Keynote makes you fight with layout before you have written a single word — dragging text boxes, choosing fonts, aligning bullets. Markdown slides invert that: you write the content first in plain text, and the formatting is applied automatically. This tool takes Markdown in the editor, splits it into slides, and renders a full-screen deck you can navigate with your keyboard. Because Markdown is just text, your deck is portable, version-controllable, diffable in Git, and free of the binary bloat of a .pptx file. Everything runs in your browser; your Markdown never leaves your device.

How slides are separated

The single rule you must know is the slide delimiter. The tool splits your document wherever it finds a line containing exactly three dashes — --- — surrounded by newlines. Each chunk between delimiters becomes one slide, trimmed of surrounding whitespace, and empty chunks are dropped. So this source produces three slides:

# Title
---
## Agenda
- Point one
---
## Thanks

The slide counter in the editor and the top bar of the presentation both reflect this count live as you type, so you always know how many slides you have without leaving the editor.

Which Markdown features are supported

The renderer implements a focused, presentation-friendly subset of Markdown:

This is intentionally smaller than full CommonMark. Tables, images, and links are not part of the renderer, which keeps slides clean and the parser fast and predictable — exactly what you want when the goal is a readable talk rather than a document.

A worked example

Paste the following into the editor:

# Quarterly Review
---
## Wins
- Shipped the new dashboard
- Cut load time by **40%**
---
## Code
```js
fetch('/api/stats')
```

The tool reports "3 slides." Press Present and slide one shows a large title, slide two shows two bullets with "40%" in bold, and slide three renders the fenced JavaScript as a styled code block. A progress bar at the bottom fills as you advance, and a counter shows your position, such as "2 / 3."

Navigating the presentation

• Arrow keys move between slides — right and down-style forward, left back. This is the fastest way to present hands-free.
• Home and End jump straight to the first and last slide, useful for skipping back to a title or to a closing call-to-action during questions.
• Escape exits the full-screen viewer and returns you to the editor, where you can fix a typo and re-enter instantly.
• On-screen Prev / Next buttons work when you would rather click, and they disable themselves at the first and last slide so you always know where the deck ends.

You can also click any thumbnail in the editor to jump directly into presentation mode starting on that slide — handy for rehearsing a specific section.

Practical tips for good Markdown decks

• One idea per slide. Because adding a slide is just typing ---, there is no friction to splitting a crowded slide in two. Use that freedom — sparse slides read better than dense ones.
• Lead with a heading. Starting each slide with # or ## gives the viewer an anchor and gives the thumbnails a readable title.
• Keep code blocks short. Fenced blocks render at presentation size, so a 30-line function will overflow. Show the few lines that matter and talk through the rest.
• Write speaker prose as bullets, not paragraphs. Long paragraphs shrink awkwardly; three crisp bullets project clearly to the back of a room.

Privacy and a note on safety

All parsing and rendering happen locally in your browser — there is no upload step, so your draft talk stays private and the tool works offline. The renderer also escapes any raw HTML you type before applying its Markdown transforms, so pasting markup like an image tag will display the literal characters rather than executing anything. That makes it safe to drop in untrusted text, but it also means you cannot embed custom HTML to extend the formatting; stick to the supported Markdown syntax above.