DemoIt is a tool that helps you create beautiful live-coding demonstrations.

I'm doing lots of live-coding during conferences and I like tools like reveal.js to create slides. What I wanted was a tool that has some of the properties of reveal.js but with capabilities to code and run commands in front of the audience.

Two things are really important to me:

• For a given presentation, the slides should live in the same repository as the code.
• The tool should allow context-switching-less live coding demos. Attendees don't want to watch me switching between a browser, an IDE and a terminal all the time.

This is how I came up with DemoIt.

DemoIt is a small command line tool written in Go. It serves rich web content composed of text, images and smart web components.

Those web components make most of the magic.

• One component displays multi-tab ttys that can be used to run any command.
• Another is a web browser view that auto refreshes itself.
• Another is a code viewer with highlighing and tabs that looks like a real IDE,

curl -L -odemoit https://github.com/dgageot/demoit/releases/download/v1.0/demoit-`uname -s | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'`-`uname -m`
sudo install demoit /usr/local/bin/demoit

To have a correct display in the web terminal, it's better to install the font Inconsolata for Powerline on your computer. This font can be found here.

# Create an empty directory
cd $HOME; mkdir my-demoit-presentation; cd $HOME/my-demoit-presentation
# Download a sample demo
curl -L https://github.com/dgageot/demoit/archive/master.tar.gz | tar xvf - --strip-components=2 demoit-master/sample
# Run demoit
demoit

Then, browse to http://localhost:8888

Pro tip: Run demoit -dev instead and enjoy live reload each time you change the content of the slides.

Basically, the idea is to:

• Write content in demoit.html at the root of the project. This file contains all the html slides separated with ---.
• Add images, fonts and scripts in the .demoit folder at the root of the project.
• Customize the style sheet in .demoit/style.css.

git clone https://github.com/dgageot/demoit.git
cd demoit
go install

This requires Go 1.19 or later.