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Introduction

kyma turns one markdown file into a slide deck you present in the terminal, with animated transitions between the slides.

What kyma is

kyma reads a markdown file and shows it as slides in your terminal. A line of four dashes splits the file into slides, and each slide can open with a little YAML, its front matter, that sets its transition, border, colours, theme and layout. Moving from one slide to the next plays a short animation: the slides swipe, slide, flip, collapse or dissolve into each other.

It’s made for giving talks from the place you already write code. The deck is a text file you keep in git, the terminal is the projector, and saving the file while you present updates the slide on screen.

What it isn’t

  • An exporter. There’s no PDF, HTML or image output. A kyma deck is presented in a terminal, or shared as the markdown it’s written in.
  • A slide editor. There’s no canvas to drag things around on. You write markdown, and grid tags when you want columns.
  • Mouse-driven. Everything is on the keyboard. Presentation clickers work too, because they send Page Down, Page Up and F5.

Timeline

  1. 2026

      • Presentation clickers work: Page Down and Page Up move between slides, and F5 goes back to the first.

      • Grids are rewritten as nested [grid], [row] and [col] tags, with sizes, gaps, padding, alignment and borders.
      • Master layouts, filled from slots.

      • Building kyma needs Go 1.26.

      • The collapse, expand and fade transitions.
      • The timer is back.

  2. 2025

      • kyma is relicensed under the GPL-3.0.

      • A slide taller than the terminal shows a message instead of a broken frame.
      • Transitions between slides of different heights stop crashing.
      • A slide’s own style wins over its preset’s.

      • A new markdown parser and renderer.
      • Images, drawn by chafa.
      • kyma docs, a tour deck built into the binary.
      • The timer is switched off for dropping frames.

    4. v0.2.0

      • Speaker notes in a second terminal, with kyma -n.

    6. v0.1.8

      • Line-highlighted code blocks.
      • A timer for the talk and for each slide.
      • A log file, with -l to choose where.

    7. v0.1.7

      • Jumping several slides at once.
      • Live reload is on by default, and -s turns it off.
      • The first release binaries.

    8. v0.1.6

      • Go to slide.

    9. v0.1.5

      • The command palette.

    10. v0.1.4

      • kyma.yaml, with a global style and named presets, and -c to pick the file.
      • Home, End, 0 and $ go to the first and last slide.

    11. v0.1.3

      • Glamour themes, and custom themes from JSON.

    12. v0.1.2

      • swipeRight.
      • Going back plays a transition in reverse.
      • Live reload, which keeps your place in the deck.

    13. v0.1.0

      • layout places a slide’s content inside its frame.

      • Front matter: each slide sets its own transition and style.

      • swipeLeft and flip.

      • slideUp and slideDown.

      • The first commit: markdown rendered with Glamour, and switching between slides.

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