remark VS zim-desktop-wiki

Eh there are loads of these based on Markdown that are much better. I think revealjs is the most popular, but I like remarkjs:

https://github.com/gnab/remark

There's a list of them here:

Thanks for your comment, u/legitEngin. Indeed, I do see a slew of Markdown-to-presentation plugins (this work was inspired by one at https://github.com/gnab/remark), and I hope I can inspire more instructors to consider using plain text to organize their work instead of lugging around heavy PPTs.

remarkjs github; easy guide; simple demo with default settings

One of my proudest open source contributions is also to excalidraw. It's a small tweak. Since about a year ago, chrome will re-save the .png to disk when you ctrl+s or cmd+s (with the embedded scene, and without prompting for a location). It gives you a really nice workflow for documentation and remark-style slides for presentations.

just some text, but easy to tweak/adopt/write? -> https://remarkjs.com

It's a good idea, which is why it's already been done. That's not to say you shouldn't finish it! You might improve on the idea, or it might just be a good learning experience.

I've given presentations in ReMark before, which is basically "markdown -> web slideshow" using a JS blob. Worked alright for simple presentations without complicated formatting needs, and loads all the images on the fly, so it implicitly picks up any re-generated figures. It also made it very easily to collaborate on presentations via GitHub, since the whole "presentation" was a short text file.

I'll slightly modify your argument; because Pure HTML does suck:

Why don't people make static sites with a simple "Markdown-or-Similar to HTML" converter, CSS, and vanilla JS...etc?

(This is what I do, btw -- http://zim-wiki.org + a template)

You should add Zim [1] to the "Personal Knowledge Management" section :)

[1] https://zim-wiki.org

https://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/

And I just tweaked the CSS and added a bit of logic to included the possibility of one image per slide; as well as editing slides not with raw HTML but with https://zim-wiki.org (because that's what I'm really used to, I'm sure any Markdown thing would work just as well).

Absolutely; recently I realize I wish I'd never learned vim. I use too many other programs that are at least CUA-ish ( http://zim-wiki.org is the most important app I use ) and now I kind of want out. I haven't yet tried Modeless Vim, but that looks like my next experiment.

https://github.com/SebastianMuskalla/ModelessVim

It is so hard not to feel REALLY SMUG reading stuff like this, as someone who has run my own website as the working primary source for my college instruction for the past 15 years or so using https://zim-wiki.org. (before Markdown was much of a thing!)

It's borderline bizarre to have watched this method of doing things kind of die out, and then also come back in the form of "static site generators" -- which, frankly, are still way clunkier than this.

Write in Zim, export to html, rsync to site. Easy.

FWIW, I've been using http://zim-wiki.org for YEARS. (Sites a little messy and I need to clean it up, but it's extremely functional,) I host my college classes websites from it, to the point that I forced myself to learn the Canvas API, to just clone the page from this site to the front page of Canvas and change the links so they come back here.

jrm4.com