patat/README.md

patat

patat (Presentations And The ANSI Terminal) is a small tool that allows you to show presentations using only an ANSI terminal. It does not require ncurses.

patat is written in Haskell and built upon the great Pandoc library. This means it is theoretically not limited to Markdown, but can support every input format that Pandoc supports.

Table of Contents

• Installation
  • Using stack
  • Using cabal
• Running
• Input format
• Configuration
  • Theming
• Trivia

Installation

You can build from source using stack install or cabal install. patat is also available from Hackage.

For people unfamiliar with the Haskell ecosystem, this means you can do either of the following:

Using stack

1. Install stack for your platform.
2. Clone this repository.
3. Run stack setup (if you're running stack for the first time) and stack install.
4. Make sure $HOME/.local/bin is in your $PATH.

Using cabal

1. Install cabal for your platform.
2. Run cabal install patat.
3. Make sure $HOME/.cabal/bin is in your $PATH.

Running

patat [--watch] presentation.md

Controls:

• Next slide: space, enter, l, →
• Previous slide: backspace, h, ←
• Go forward 10 slides: j, ↓
• Go backward 10 slides: k, ↑
• First slide: 0
• Last slide: G
• Reload file: r
• Quit: q

The r key is very useful since it allows you to preview your slides while you are writing them. You can also use this to fix artifacts when the terminal is resized.

If you provide the --watch flag, patat will watch the presentation file for changes and reload automatically. This is very useful when you are writing the presentation.

Input format

The input format can be anything that Pandoc supports. Plain markdown is usually the most simple solution:

---
title: This is my presentation
author: Jane Doe
...

# This is a slide

Slide contents.  Yay.

---

# Important title

Things I like:

- Markdown
- Haskell
- Pandoc

Horizontal rulers (---) are used to split slides.

However, if you prefer not use these since they are a bit intrusive in the markdown, you can also start every slide with an h1 header. In that case, the file should not contain a single horizontal ruler.

This means the following document is equivalent:

---
title: This is my presentation
author: Jane Doe
...

# This is a slide

Slide contents.  Yay.

# Important title

Things I like:

- Markdown
- Haskell
- Pandoc

Configuration

patat is fairly configurable. The configuration is done using YAML. There are two places where you can put your configuration:

1. In the presentation file itself, using the Pandoc metadata header.
2. In $HOME/.patat.yaml

For example, we can turn on line wrapping by using the following file:

---
title: Presentation with wrapping
author: John Doe
patat:
    wrap: true
...

This is a split
line which should
be re-wrapped.

Or we can use a normal presentation and have the following $HOME/.patat.yaml:

wrap: true

Theming

Colors and other properties can also be changed using this configuration. For example, we can have:

---
author: 'Jasper Van der Jeugt'
title: 'This is a test'
patat:
    wrap: true
    theme:
        emph: [vividBlue, onVividBlack, bold]
        imageTarget: [onDullWhite, vividRed]
...

# This is a presentation

This is _emph_ text.

![Hello](foo.png)

The properties that can be given a list of styles are:

• borders
• header
• codeBlock
• bulletList
• orderedList
• blockQuote
• definitionTerm
• definitionList
• tableHeader
• tableSeparator
• emph
• strong
• code
• linkText
• linkTarget
• strikeout
• quoted
• math
• imageText
• imageTarget

The accepted styles are:

• bold
• dullBlack
• dullBlue
• dullCyan
• dullGreen
• dullMagenta
• dullRed
• dullWhite
• dullYellow
• onDullBlack
• onDullBlue
• onDullCyan
• onDullGreen
• onDullMagenta
• onDullRed
• onDullWhite
• onDullYellow
• onVividBlack
• onVividBlue
• onVividCyan
• onVividGreen
• onVividMagenta
• onVividRed
• onVividWhite
• onVividYellow
• underline
• vividBlack
• vividBlue
• vividCyan
• vividGreen
• vividMagenta
• vividRed
• vividWhite
• vividYellow

Trivia

"Patat" is the Flemish word for a simple potato. Dutch people also use it to refer to French Fries but I don't really do that -- in Belgium we just call fries "Frieten".

The idea of patat is largely based upon MDP which is in turn based upon VTMC. I wanted to write a clone using Pandoc because I ran into a markdown parsing bug in MDP which I could not work around. A second reason to do a Pandoc-based tool was that I would be able to use Literate Haskell as well. Lastly, I also prefer not to install Node.js on my machine if I can avoid it.