/grezi-next

A re-done and re-factored verison of my old presentation software I wrote in 10th grade

Primary LanguageRustGNU General Public License v3.0GPL-3.0

grezi-next

A re-done and re-factored verison of my old presentation software I wrote in 10th grade

Grezi allows you to write presentations using plain text. It's designed to make presentations that are very engaging, with little effort on your part.

Note that: Grezi depends on the Helix text editor for syntax highlighting. If you don't have Helix, you can find a binary here

Features

IDE Support:

Grezi is designed to be used with an IDE (Helix is what I've been using). Not only does the language have syntax highlighting and indentation hints thanks to the tree-sitter parser, but it also has an embedded language server that makes the process of making slideshows easier. Features of the LSP include

  • Rename symbol support
  • Goto declaration support
  • Goto reference support
  • Code formatting
  • Semantic tokens support (Syntax highlighting in non tree-sitter editors, eg. VSCode)
  • Inlay hints for edges and slide numbers
  • Errors and diagnostics support
  • Hot reloading as you type
  • Snippet for copying down the previous slide and removing exited objects
  • Folding Ranges
  • Automatic "Hello World" boilerplate for empty files

You can use the LSP by runing grezi with the --lsp argument

Note about VSCode

After making a VSCode extension, I found that everything in the LSP works except for completions. For now, until I figure that out, Grezi's LSP doesn't officially support VSCode. Try Helix

Hot Reloading:

Grezi allows you to hot reload your presentation as you create it. There are 2 hot reloading implementations

  • LSP (ideal): Just run the LSP, every keystroke you make will be reflected in the slideshow window.
  • Watching: When not in LSP mode, Grezi will watch the open presentation for changes. This implementation is slower than using the LSP hot reloading, but if you don't have an IDE, this should work for you.

Cairo based exporting

Grezi allows you to export your presentation to PDF, PostScript, and many image formats using the cairo library. Just use the export flag like so

grezi -eo new.pdf new.grz 
grezi -eo new.ps new.grz 
grezi -eo new.png -i 6 new.grz 
grezi -eo new.png -i 6..8 new.grz 
grezi -eo new.png -i 6..8 -s 512 new.grz 
grezi -eo new.png -i 6..8 -s 1920x1080 new.grz

Warning: You can also export to SVG, however, this method is not very reliable.

Web Runtime

Grezi can export to various static formats, but you can also share the animated version of your presentations via the WebAssembly runtime. Using the runtime is easy

  1. Install these
  • trunk
  • brotli
  • wasm-opt
  • GNU parallel
  1. Build the WebAssembly runtime
trunk build --release
  1. Export any slideshows you want to share to the .slideshow format (A custom format that packs your slideshow, all used fonts, and all used images together into one file)
grezi -eo new.slideshow new.grz
grezi -eo another.slideshow another.grz
  1. Move the slideshows you want to share into the dist/ directory that trunk created in step 2
mv new.slideshow dist/
mv another.slideshow dist/
  1. Run the opt.sh script to compress everything and optimize the WASM binary
sh opt.sh

Optionally, pass a directory to opt.sh to move all the slideshow files in it to the dist directory

sh opt.sh ~/slideshows/
  1. Serve the dist/ directory with the server of your choice and go to this URL
https://{YOUR DOMAIN}/index.html#{A SLIDESHOW}.slideshow