Presentations with Vyasa
3-min read
Slides Start from the Document
What are slides, really, except docs wearing a cleaner shirt and trying to make eye contact before the meeting dies. Vyasa does not ask you to write a second deck. It takes the same markdown you already use for reading view and lets you enter a calmer presentation mode from the Present button.
The reading page stays the source of truth. The slide page is only another way to walk through the same document.
The Split is Natural
Every ## heading starts a new horizontal slide. Moving right means moving to the next major section, which is where your talk was going before somebody opened a sidebar argument about process.
Vertical Slides Come from Deeper Headings
Every ###, ####, and deeper heading becomes a downward move under the current ## section. This keeps detail attached to its parent instead of flattening the whole deck into one long confession of poor planning.
Every Slide Has a Real URL
Each slide lives at its own path, such as /slides/demo/vyasa-slides/slide-3. That makes refresh, copy-link, and “open in another tab” behave like normal pages instead of a brittle little state machine held together by optimism.
Present from Here
In doc view, headings expose a Present from here action. Vyasa uses the current heading to find the matching slide URL and opens the deck at that point.
Navigation Stays Lightweight
Slide-to-slide movement uses the same HTMX-style page swapping Vyasa already uses for normal document navigation. Left and right arrow keys work, and mobile swipe follows the same left-right model, because even doomscroll-trained thumbs deserve a little consistency.
There are no transitions, overview screens, or deck-specific themes here. This mode is intentionally closer to focused reading than to presentation software trying to distract everyone from the content with ceremonial smoke.
The Theme is the Document Theme
The slide page reuses the normal document shell, so fonts, background, theme preset, and custom.css come from the same place as reading view. If the doc theme changes, the slide page inherits that change on refresh, which is how it should work in a system that has known suffering and chosen not to add more.
The Escape Hatches are Obvious
Breadcrumbs at the top, the underlined title, and the Back to doc view link all return to the normal document page with sidebars intact.
Long Sections Still Read Like Pages
Vyasa does not trap long content inside a tiny slide viewport. If a section is tall, the page scrolls like a normal document page, because squeezing a table into a postage stamp is not a feature, it is an act of hostility.
That means code samples, tables, tabs, diagrams, and dense prose do not need to be mutilated just to fit a fixed canvas.