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

Command	What it does
Present current note	Converts the note and opens the presentation in your browser.
Present current note with watch	The same, and keeps Marp running so edits refresh the page.
Export current note to HTML	Writes the presentation next to the note, inside your vault.
Stop presentation	Stops a running watch process.

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.