I needed to throw together a quick presentation for an internal team meeting at work, but I've maxed out my Slides.com free usage and really hate Google's offering, so went digging for something better. Thanks to the Front End Horse community, I was introduced to Sli.dev. It's a solution with a clear learning curve – especially if you've never used Vue.js before – but after an hour of noodling around, I had a completely useable slide deck. Another couple of hours later and I had a custom, branded theme, using our company fonts and colours throughout. And now that's setup, all I have to do is clone the Git repo and edit the solitary Markdown file that controls the entire deck. I kinda love it 😅

But there's more to the codebase then scratching a bit of a developer itch. It comes with some great tools bundled, including prebaked slide animations, code formatting/highlighting, and some very clever custom focus order management so you can click through and showcase specific aspects of a slide in a preset sequence. The presentation mode is surprisingly robust, making it trivial (particularly with multiple monitors) to see all of your notes, the next slide, and various other tools whilst everyone else only sees the presentation. And, it's completely self-hosted, so I could render out the final deck and stick it on a web host somewhere to archive it indefinitely.

There are some downsides, but I've not hit anything too egregious. It has a very minor loading time, and there is an irritating reliance on additional abstractions, so your templates are all in Vue (not a bad choice) and CSS defaults to UnoCSS, but even here I was able to revert to pretty much vanilla CSS with relative ease. So really, as long as you can get past the unconventional install method (npm and CLI commands), this is a very robust piece of kit.