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Presenting notes as slides

Any note can be shown as a Slidev deck — every bare --- line is a slide break (a note with none is a one-slide deck).

  • Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+P shows the current note fullscreen, layered over the whole app rather than opening a tab. Arrow keys move between slides; Esc (or menu View → Stop Presenting, Cmd+.) returns you exactly where you were. Rebind it in .config/settings.md under ## Shortcuts, row mahfouz/slidev:present-fullscreen.
  • A note’s menu (sidebar, tab, or toolbar ⋯) offers Present as a regular tab instead, with Reload, Presenter (opens Slidev’s presenter view — speaker notes, timer — in your system browser), Browser (opens the deck itself there), and Restart (restarts the shared Slidev server) in its toolbar.
  • PDF: a note’s menu → Export… (or Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+E) → Format PDF renders the deck to a PDF; once it’s ready, Save… asks where to put it. Page shape follows the note’s Orientation.
  • Enable it first: Present is the Slidev presentations plugin and PDF export the PDF export plugin (Preferences → Plugins), both from the built-in mahfouz registry. Each can be on without the other; the Export dialog only offers PDF while the PDF export plugin is on. Installing either downloads Slidev, a headless browser and its own Node.js runtime (about 50 MB of that) — a one-time download of a few hundred MB, with a progress bar in the status bar (PDF export installs Slidev as its dependency). You don’t need Node.js installed yourself. Editing the note updates the presentation live.

Slides templates

A template gives your decks a look — background color or image, text and accent colors, a font, a logo, a footer — for both Present and PDF export.

  • Create them in Vault Settings → Slides. Use as default applies a template to every note that doesn’t pick one.
  • Pick one for a note from the slides-template menu on the editor toolbar (next to the orientation toggle, shown once the vault has a template): Default, a named template, or None to opt the note out. The choice is stored as the note’s slides_template attribute.
  • Cover slide: the optional cover fields (background, image, text color, logo) replace the main ones on the first slide only.
  • Header and footer: one line of inline Markdown drawn at the top and bottom of every slide. Both can use fields — !title, !page, !total — expanded when the deck is presented or exported.
  • A note overrides a template’s header/footer with its own header / footer attribute (none turns that side off), and a title_slide attribute leaves slide 1 bare of either. A note whose slides_template is none still shows its own header or footer, if it has one.
  • Custom CSS runs after the fields, for anything they don’t cover. Each slide is .slidev-page, and slide N is also .slidev-page-N.
  • Font is a Google Fonts family name such as Inter, downloaded when the deck loads.
  • Images are copied into the vault’s files/ directory, and deleting a note never removes an image a template still uses.
  • Templates live in .config/slides.md, one ## <name> section per template, so they sync with the vault and can be edited by hand. Presenting picks up template changes the next time you present or switch notes.