How to create and present presentations from the Linux command line

In the Linux world, there are several different ways for you to choose from to give a presentation. For example, Impress.js has a large number of multimedia displays and excellent visual impact, Beamer is specially provided for LaTex users, and so on. And if you're looking for an easy way to create and display text presentations, mdp can help.

What is Mdp?

mdp is the next ncurses-based command line demonstration tool for Linux. What I like about mdp is its support for markdown, which makes it easy for me to create slideshows in the familiar markdown format. Naturally, it can also easily publish slideshows in HTML format. Another benefit is that it supports UTF-8 character encoding, which makes it easy to display non-English characters (such as Greek or Cyrillic letters).

Install Mdp in Linux

mdp requires few dependencies (such as ncursesw), which makes installation very simple.

Debian, Ubuntu or their derivatives

$ sudo apt-get install git gcc make libncursesw5-dev	
$ git clone https://github.com/visit1985/mdp.git 	
$ cd mdp
$ make
$ sudo make install

Fedora or CentOS/RHEL

$ sudo yum install git gcc make ncurses-devel
$ git clone https://github.com/visit1985/mdp.git
$ cd mdp
$ make
$ sudo make install

Arch Linux

Arch Linux can easily install mdp via AUR.

Create presentations from the command line

After installing mdp, you can use your favorite text editor to easily create a presentation. If you are familiar with markdown, you can quickly master mdp. For those who are not familiar with markdown, the best way to learn mdp is to start with an example.

Here is a 6-page presentation sample for reference.

 	%title: Sample Presentation made with mdp (Xmodulo.com)
 	%author: Dan Nanni
 	%date: 2015-01-28
 	
 	-> This is a slide title  mdp is a command-line based presentation tool with markdown support.  # Example of nested list  # Example of code block formatting 
 	4
 	5 int main()
 	6 {
 	7 printf("Hello World");
 	8 return 0;
 	9 }
 	
 	This example shows inline code: `sudo reboot`
 	
 	-------------------------------------------------
 	
 	-> # Example of nested quotes  This is the first-level quote.
 	>> This is the second-level quote
 	>> and continues.
 	>>> *This is the third-level quote, and so on.*
 	
 	-------------------------------------------------
 	
 	-> # Example of citations  # Example of UTF-8 special characters 
<div style="font-size: 14pt; color: white; background-color: black; border-left: red 10px solid; padding-left: 14px; margin-bottom: 20px; margin-top: 20px;"><strong>Show presentations from the command line</strong></div>
<p>After you save the above code as a text file slide.md, you can run the following command to display the presentation: </p>
<pre class="brush:php;toolbar:false"> 	$ mdp slide.md

You can press enter/space/page down/cursor down key (next slide), back/page up/cursor up key (previous slide), Home (slide homepage), End ( Slide last page) or number N (Nth slide) to operate your presentation.

The title of the presentation will be displayed at the top of each slide, and your name and page number will appear at the bottom of the slide.

This is an example effect of nested lists and multi-level headers.

This is an example of the effect of code snippets and inline code.

This is the instance effect of nested references.

This is an example effect of placing a citation.

This is an example effect of UTF-8 encoding special character support.

Summary

In this tutorial, I demonstrate how to use mdp from the command line to create and display a presentation. The markdown compatibility of mdp saves us the trouble of learning other new formats, which is an advantage over another presentation tool called tpp. Due to the limitations of mdp, it may not be your default presentation tool. However, it is worth affirming that it will definitely come in handy on some occasions. What do you think of mdp? Is there anything else you like?

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