Building Slide Presentations with present
Presentation as Code
The Golang package present may be the key to making attractive slide presentations with less work and hassle.
Creating slide presentations has been a necessary part of technical life for a long time, but creating crisp and beautiful slides using the popular traditional tools requires a lot of tedious work. I have always been intrigued by the elegant presentations in Golang community talks, but there was no clear-cut information available on how those beautiful presentations were rendered. In researching, I stumbled upon a Golang package named, not surprisingly, present
[1], which renders amazing presentation slides from markup text description. For many years now, present
has been my go-to tool for creating and delivering impressive presentations.
Getting Started
There is no separate installation step needed to start using the present
utility. It's just a statically linked binary that is grab-and-run; there's no need to set up any other runtime dependencies. You do need the Golang compilation toolchain already set up on your machine if you want to run the present
command natively. Alternatively, you can run present
out of the box, provided Docker Engine is installed on your machine (which is very common nowadays). I personally took the Docker route to use present
without doing any extra work. You can use the Dockerfile (Listing 1) and script (Listing 2) to fetch and run present
to display your slides on your local machine.
To create a Docker image from which you can launch present
, use the following command:
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

News
-
Red Hat Releases RHEL 10 Early
Red Hat quietly rolled out the official release of RHEL 10.0 a bit early.
-
openSUSE Joins End of 10
openSUSE has decided to not only join the End of 10 movement but it also will no longer support the Deepin Desktop Environment.
-
New Version of Flatpak Released
Flatpak 1.16.1 is now available as the latest, stable version with various improvements.
-
IBM Announces Powerhouse Linux Server
IBM has unleashed a seriously powerful Linux server with the LinuxONE Emperor 5.
-
Plasma Ends LTS Releases
The KDE Plasma development team is doing away with the LTS releases for a good reason.
-
Arch Linux Available for Windows Subsystem for Linux
If you've ever wanted to use a rolling release distribution with WSL, now's your chance.
-
System76 Releases COSMIC Alpha 7
With scores of bug fixes and a really cool workspaces feature, COSMIC is looking to soon migrate from alpha to beta.
-
OpenMandriva Lx 6.0 Available for Installation
The latest release of OpenMandriva has arrived with a new kernel, an updated Plasma desktop, and a server edition.
-
TrueNAS 25.04 Arrives with Thousands of Changes
One of the most popular Linux-based NAS solutions has rolled out the latest edition, based on Ubuntu 25.04.
-
Fedora 42 Available with Two New Spins
The latest release from the Fedora Project includes the usual updates, a new kernel, an official KDE Plasma spin, and a new System76 spin.