Tech Talk

An opinionated Markdown-based technical slideshow tool with a built-in terminal that just works.

• Write your slides with Markdown
• Built-in terminal (both local or via SSH)
• Supports presenter mode with notes & timer, cloned displays, etc.
• Simple, self-contained executable for Winows, Mac & Linux
• PDF export with your browser's built-in print to PDF
• Trivial to customize and distribute within your company

Usage

Start by downloading a release or your company's variant. You probably want to put it into /usr/local/bin/tech-talk on Mac / Linux. On Windows you can save tech-talk.exe anywhere as it is fully self-contained / portable.

# See a demo slideshow
tech-talk

# Use your own slides
tech-talk slides.md

# Use SSH to connect to some server for the terminal
tech-talk -host user@hostname slides.md

# Custom ports are also allowed
tech-talk -host user@hostname:port slides.md

# Windows users must pass an authentication method as an internal SSH
# mechanism is used instead of OpenSSH. Keys are recommended over passwords.
tech-talk -host user@hostname -pass cleartext-password slides.md
tech-talk -host user@hostname -key id_rsa slides.md
tech-talk -host user@hostname -key my-key.pem slides.md

# Mac / Linux users can force the use of the internal SSH client and use the
# same options that Windows users would use from above.
tech-talk -ssh internal ...

Then go to http://localhost:4000/ to view.

Customization

Sending around boilerplate or configs to everyone sucks. Build your own self-contained executable with your company's theme and let people focus on making great talks.

First you'll want to install Go. Then:

mkdir -p $GOPATH/src/github.com/danielgtaylor
cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/danielgtaylor
git clone https://github.com/danielgtaylor/tech-talk.git
cd tech-talk
go install

Now, make your customizations!

• Slideshow prefix (prepended to first slide)
• Stylesheet (fonts, colors, layout, etc)
• Javascript (transitions)
• Terminal default font size
• Example slideshow
• HTML template

Once you are ready:

# Build for your OS and test
./build.sh
./tech-talk

# Or, cross-compile, e.g:
GOOS=linux GOARCH=386 ./build.sh

# Automated release (cross-compile to supported platforms):
./release.sh

Remember to run ./build.sh each time you make a change, and your browser may cache items so Cmd+Shift+R or Ctrl+Shift+R to force a refresh are useful.

Now you can upload your executables somewhere like Google Drive and share them within the company.

Acknowledgments

This project is possible because of the amazing work done by many people in the following projects, many of which are used with slight modifications or custom settings:

• Remark.js
• Socket.io
• pty
• Wetty
• crypto/ssh

So, how does this beast work? Simple, really. It starts both a web server and Socket.IO server, renders an index page with Remark.js using the user-supplied Markdown, which in turn contains an iframe with a terminal that uses the socket to communicate with a PTY running either a login shell or ssh session. For the internal SSH client there is no client-side PTY but instead a couple pipes through an SSH connection.

License

https://dgt.mit-license.org/