Terminalogue Presenter

Terminalogue Presenter

Turn a Marp note into an HTML presentation — with terminals that type themselves.

Terminalogue Presenter takes the note you are looking at, converts it with Marp CLI, and opens the result in your default browser. Any ```termlogue block in the deck becomes an animated terminal session: commands typed one character at a time, output arriving line by line, playable and pausable on the slide.

It is the presentation half of Terminalogue, whose Obsidian plugin renders those same blocks in Reading View.

---
marp: true
---

# Installing Nginx

```termlogue
@theme ubuntu
@size 72x16
@prompt [root@rhel10 ~]#

$ dnf install -y nginx
Updating repositories...
Complete!
```

Commands are never executed. A termlogue block is prose that looks like a shell session — see Security.

Requirements

• Obsidian Desktop. The plugin is isDesktopOnly because it runs Marp CLI as a separate program, which the mobile app cannot do.
• Marp CLI, installed by you. This plugin never installs, updates or downloads anything; it only runs the Marp you already have. Install it however you prefer, for example npm install -g @marp-team/marp-cli or scoop install marp, then check the path in the plugin's settings.

Commands

Settings

• Marp executable — the path to Marp CLI. Leave it empty to look for marp on PATH. Set it explicitly when Obsidian was started from a launcher, because a launcher's PATH is often not the shell's.
• Open browser automatically — whether a finished presentation opens itself.

What this plugin does outside your vault

Obsidian asks plugins to say this plainly, and it is worth knowing:

• It writes outside the vault. Present current note generates the presentation into a new directory under your system temporary directory, one per session, and cleans up after itself. Nothing is written into the vault, because a generated HTML file and its assets are build output rather than notes. Export current note to HTML is the exception, and it is opt-in: it writes into the vault, next to the note, because that is what exporting means.
• It starts one program: your Marp CLI. The executable named in the settings, with the note's path and the output path as arguments. It is started directly, never through a shell, and never with anything a note contains as an argument.
• It opens your browser on the generated file, using the operating system's default handler.
• It makes no network requests, sends no telemetry, and needs no account. The generated presentation is self-contained: the Terminalogue stylesheet and runtime are inlined into the HTML, so a deck works offline, on a plane, from a USB stick.

Security

Nothing in a termlogue block is ever executed — not by this plugin, not by Marp, not by the generated presentation. A block is text that is drawn to look like a terminal.

The one program this plugin starts is the Marp CLI its settings name. It is spawned with shell: false, with the executable and its arguments kept separate, so no path and no note content is ever interpreted as a shell command. On Windows an npm-installed marp.cmd is launched through cmd.exe — Node refuses to spawn .cmd directly — with every argument quoted individually, and arguments containing quotes or newlines are refused rather than escaped.

Building it yourself

npm install
npm run check    # build, lint, typecheck, test
npm run build

vendor/terminalogue-marp-engine.mjs is the Terminalogue Marp engine, vendored: it is the bundle @terminalogue/marp builds, embedded into main.js as a string and written to a scratch directory when a presentation is generated. That is what lets a deck's terminals animate without Marp needing anything installed alongside it. Refresh it from a Terminalogue checkout with:

node scripts/vendor-engine.mjs ../Terminalogue

Lint includes eslint-plugin-obsidianmd, the rule set the community directory runs against a submission, so npm run lint is the same check the review makes.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.