A dark slide titled 'The pipeline' with four numbered steps and a diagram from .slaide to IR (JSON) to web and PDF.
From the slaide language deck, rendered with slaide.

A Markdown Presentation Workflow in Your Editor

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Starting a deck in PowerPoint has a cost I do not like: the mouse. A text file in the editor I already use for code is faster for me. That is an opinion, not a benchmark.

What the workflow is

Open your editor and start a .slaide file. Markdown goes into the slides. A config block at the top, called headmatter, sets deck-wide options such as the theme. Slides are separated by ---. No “new slide” button, and no dragging a text box to the spot where the last slide had one. The file structure docs list every key.

---
title: Q3 numbers
---
## Q3 numbers
MRR up 12%, churn flat at 2.1%.
---
## What changed
- New onboarding flow
- Trial length cut from 14 days to 7
- Trial-to-paid conversion up 4 points

The numbers in this example are made up. Check the deck, then preview it:

slaide validate deck.slaide
slaide dev deck.slaide

The CLI reference says validate reports parse errors with line numbers, and dev is a live preview. If a slide is wrong, you fix the text, not the layout, because the theme sets the layout. Compare that to PowerPoint’s loop: click a text box, click again to enter it, type, click away, notice the box did not resize, fix the box.

What is good about it

The deck is a text file. It lives in the same repo as everything else, gets reviewed the same way, and shows up in git log. You can find an old deck by grepping a repo for a client name. You cannot do that with a folder full of .pptx files.

The theme is picked once and every slide inherits it. Nobody nudges a font size on slide 7 because it looked different from slide 6.

What still needs PowerPoint

Here is the limit. When someone on the other side needs to edit the deck and does not know what a .slaide file is, which is most people, you export:

slaide export deck.slaide --pptx deck.pptx

The CLI reference says the export is an editable PowerPoint file with real text, shapes and images. Export uses headless Chromium. Run npx playwright install chromium once.

Heavy manual design does not work well. If a slide has hand-placed decorative shapes, custom animations, or a background image bled to the edge with three overlapping elements, a round trip through .pptx can flatten some of it. For that kind of slide, accept a simpler layout. Or build that one slide by hand in PowerPoint and put the rest of the deck around it.

There is also an editor. The getting started guide says you can edit a deck by hand in the Slaide editor with a free account, and both the editor and the AI work on the same .slaide file. I find the text file faster once I know what I want to write. The editor helps when I want to see the slide while I build it.

Who this is for

If your decks are mostly content, and you already live in an editor and a terminal, the text workflow removes friction. If your job is designing decks, with bespoke layouts and custom illustration per slide, this will not replace what you do. I would not sell it to you that way.

The pitch is small: less time between having the sentence and having the slide. You can try Slaide and judge that for yourself.