Presenting with sent

Slideshows

Few things conjure a dreaded sense of boredom quite like the word slideshow. Generally speaking, the quality of a presentation will depend upon what is said, not what is read. It is a pity then that more time is often spent on creating “pretty” slides packed with bullet points than preparing an engaging talk.

Most slideshow programs, such as Microsoft PowerPoint or LibreOffice Impress, come with a lot of different features: embedded videos, animation, slide transitions, etc. While these features hypothetically can be used to enhance a presentation, more likely than not, when they are used, they are merely a poor substitute for good material. Ultimately, by even allowing a user to dynamically place text how they like at font sizes they choose, such software lures its users into a trap of fitting the material to the slides rather than vice versa.

In short, most features provided by slideshow programs are footguns.

Simple presentations

In contrast, some presenters have made the effort not to bore their audience with a wall of text and bullet points. Masayoshi Takahashi is one such example, who displayed only a few words per slide with no images. Seth Godin, on the other hand, opted to display one image per slide, with no text.

I’m not intending to persuade you that one of these two methods is superior to the other, and my preference is to use a combination. Some slides are text, while other slides are images. Ultimately, the ideal presentation software with few enough features should make it easy to do this.

The good news is that this software already exists.

Using suckless software

This article is not going to be about suckless software, though that would make for an interesting article in and of itself. But to create a simple presentation is so simple, it is hardly surprising that there exists suckless software which fulfils this task.

suckless sent is a remarkably useful program for rendering slideshows with minimal effort. I say “rendering” rather than “creating” because it operates on a simple text file. Enterprise presentation software generally operates on archives of XML files, but sent is so simple that there is no reason to create a tool for generating sent presentations. All you need is a semi-decent text editor and it’s off to the races.

Let’s get started

To install sent, you will need to compile it yourself. There are also some dependencies that have to be installed. You will most likely do this all manually. That might sound like a hassle, but the benefit is that once you have it all set up on your computer, you will know how to tweak it to your liking.

After cloning the sent repository, you will need to use the Makefile to first compile the code, then install it onto your system. For example:

make
sudo make install

To demo sent, you are already provided an example presentation, consisting of the file example and the image nyan.png. To view the slideshow, you can type:

sent example

The slideshow that comes up is much like a slideshow rendered by PowerPoint. You can navigate using the mouse or the arrow keys to go forwards or backwards.

sent is simple

In a certain way, writing a sent presentation is essentially like writing a very simple script. There is no reason why, for example, you can’t create a file which starts with a shebang:

#!/usr/bin/env sent

This means that if we make our file executable, we can then view our slideshow by typing:

./my-slideshow

While that’s not a huge improvement over explicitly running sent, it is a reminder that sent really is a very simple program. If you want to modify sent, you are already working close to the metal. There are patches available online to improve image scaling, export to PDF, etc. That’s right. These features are not built in. You patch them in. Like I said earlier, I won’t explain why that’s such a good thing, as that is better suited for a separate article on suckless software in general, but sent is so simple, that it is actually very easy to patch.

A formula for sent

I gave my first sent presentation in August 2025 at the Auckland Python Meetup, not very long ago, and it was a pleasure to use. Because you can write comments using the hash symbol (#), you can write your notes in the same text file that you put your slide text and images. This is a valid sent “script”:

A little about me

# Hi all. I'm John Doe. I have been working for BigTech Corp over the last
# fifteen years as a software architect.

1979

# I got my hands on a computer for the first time in 1979, a Commodore PET, and
# as a teenager, it blew my mind.

To some extent, writing notes in this way feels quite natural. I won’t speak on everyone’s behalf, but it took me very little time to create an entire presentation, complete with slides and notes.

You can put code in your presentation, but it’s always better to live demo. Not sure if your example code will do what you want during the live demo? Then make sure! Likewise, if you want to show the audience a video, you can always use a dedicated video player.

I can’t say sent is the future of presentation software. In general, suckless software is always going to have a limited audience. But I would recommend it, amongst other things, for making it easy to make a good presentation, and making it hard to make a boring presentation.