Kadal Deck

Build it

Start from an idea, not a blank slide.

• ✦ An AI assistant that drafts with you. In the builder on deck.kadal.cc, tell it about the talk ("turn my notes into eight slides", "add a poll after the intro") and it writes and revises the deck slide by slide, checks its work against the compiler, and answers the comments on your draft. Every change is a revision you can undo. It runs on your own key from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or OpenRouter.
• ✦ Your own agent, too. The Agent Skill and the MCP server teach Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code or any MCP client the format, then let it outline, write slides, lint them, render them to look at its own work, and fix what it sees. The hosted MCP server brings your published decks to Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor.
• Write where you like. Markdown and MDX in your editor, with the VS Code extension and the kadal-deck CLI, or in the browser builder: edit right on the slide, and drop in emoji, icons, stickers, shapes, free photos, GIFs and memes from the media panel.
• Look the part. 17 themes in light and dark, 28 built-in backgrounds, and the Pro library of 95 backgrounds and layouts.

Rehearse it

Practise out loud until it's yours.

• The deck reads your notes aloud and turns its own pages as it goes, in the browser's voice or the Kokoro AI voice running in your browser. Narration shows every chapter and slide on a timeline, so you hear how long the talk really runs.
• A plan for every slide. Give each slide a time; the timer's bar marks where you should be, and a pacing badge says how far ahead or behind you are, so you find the long parts before the day.
• A teleprompter and the presenter view. Your notes, big, on the screen you read from, following each click; and beside the slide, the notes, the next slide and the timer.
• ✦ Copilot can quiz you on your notes while you rehearse a hosted deck.
• Glossary cards. The first mention of a term links to its definition, so you, and later the room, never lose the thread.

Present it

Walk on stage with everything at your fingertips.

• The presenter view: notes, timer, next slide, drawing, camera and recording, and a share window for video calls.
• Your phone is the remote. A live copy of the slide, your notes, the timer, a laser and a pen, and an air pointer you aim by moving the phone, paired by a QR code. It works from a static host too. Phone remote
• ✦ Copilot in the presenter view of a hosted deck. Ask it to go to the results slide, black out the screen, circle the total on this slide, or tell you what's in your notes here.
• Laser, spotlight, pen, zoom, blackout. A built deck presents offline, and exports to PDF, PNG and PPTX.

Own the room

Keep every seat with you.

• The audience joins from their phones, from a link or the QR code on your slide, with no app and no sign-in, and follows along. The room runs on deck.kadal.cc or on your own server. The live room
• Live polls, quizzes, word clouds, Q&A with upvotes, reactions, a pace check and a raised hand, all written as components in your deck.
• Afterwards, see how it went. Every hosted deck counts its views; paid plans add the time spent on each slide, and Pro and Team keep the sessions and their peak audience, the questions, reactions and poll results. Analytics

Open source, on your side. The engine is AGPL. One deck.mdx, in git, published with one command. AI on your own key: nothing sold, no lock-in. Hosting is free for public decks, with paid plans from $4 a month.

Start in 30 seconds

You need Node 20.19 or later.

npm create @kadal/deck@latest my-talk
cd my-talk && npm install
npm run dev        # http://localhost:5173: edit deck.mdx and the slide you're on updates in place

A deck is one deck.mdx file: Markdown, split into slides at ---, with components when you need them.

---
title: Hello, room
theme: ocean
---

# Hello, room

---

## One point at a time

<Clicks>

- Slides split at `---`; a slide below this one starts at `----`
- Code steps line by line, and the notes follow your clicks

</Clicks>

---

<Poll id="lunch" question="Lunch?" options={["Dosa", "Biryani", "Both"]} />

When it's ready:

npx kadal-deck build      # dist/: a static site for any host, works offline
npx kadal-deck export     # PDF in export/ (add --png or --pptx)
npx kadal-deck publish    # a URL on deck.kadal.cc with a live room (free plan)

Rather not install anything? Write it in the builder on deck.kadal.cc. Already have a Slidev or reveal.js deck? npx kadal-deck import slidev slides.md or npx kadal-deck import reveal index.html converts it and writes a report of anything that didn't carry over.

Everything in the engine

Backgrounds and layouts

The Pro library. 95 backgrounds and layouts in 15 genres — board-pack covers, KPI boards, magazine spreads, terminal covers, lecture outlines, synthwave grids, wedding invitations — each in light and dark, each wearing your deck's theme. One line of frontmatter picks one:

---
layout: pro/kpi-board
background: pro/neon-drift
---

The library renders on decks published to deck.kadal.cc from a Pro or Team workspace. Anywhere else — a static build on your own host, or the free plan — a pro/ name falls back to the theme's own background and the default layout, so the slide still reads; only the dev server says why, in a small chip. Every item, moving, in light and dark: deck.kadal.cc/library.

Built in, free everywhere. 28 backgrounds ship with the engine — background: aurora, or <Background name="aurora" /> inside a slide — most of them animated, all paused off-slide and still under reduced motion. A few of them:

Themes

Sixteen themes, each in light and dark where it makes sense. Three are built in; the rest are packages you install and name in the headmatter (theme: ocean). Browse them all at deck.kadal.cc/themes.

Classic, seriph, crisp, bricks and shibainu are ports of the official Slidev themes, MIT-licensed, with credit to their authors in each package. npm create @kadal/deck@latest -- --theme <name> starts a theme of your own; the contract is THEMES.md.

For AI agents

Kadal Deck is built to be written by an agent as well as by you: a skill that teaches the format, an MCP server that edits slides line by line and renders them so the agent can look at its work, and a CLI whose every command answers in JSON. Guide: AI agents.

/plugin marketplace add kadalcc/deck          # Claude Code: the skill and the MCP server together
/plugin install kadal-deck@kadal-deck

npx skills add kadalcc/deck                              # the skill alone, for any agent (skills/kadal-deck)
claude mcp add kadal-deck -- npx -y @kadal/deck mcp      # the MCP server alone

For Claude Desktop, Cursor and VS Code, point the client at npx -y @kadal/deck mcp. The server works in the folder it starts in (or --dir <path>) and never reads or writes outside it unless started with --allow-outside.

Hosted decks, from any agent. The hosted service runs a remote MCP server at https://deck.kadal.cc/mcp (OAuth; you pick one workspace and can make the connection read-only). It lists and inspects your published decks, reads a talk in progress (current slide, polls, questions by votes), changes titles, visibility and passcodes, rolls back versions, makes share links, and quick-edits and publishes decks through the web builder without ever overwriting newer work. Add it as a custom connector in Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor, or with claude mcp add --transport http kadal-deck-hosted https://deck.kadal.cc/mcp.

For scripts: kadal-deck check (exit 1 on errors), kadal-deck screenshot, kadal-deck info [topic], and --json on every command. Exit codes: 0 ok, 1 failed, 2 usage, 3 not signed in, 4 missing prerequisite. @kadal/deck/catalog is everything a deck can use as data, @kadal/deck/authoring reads, lints and edits a deck as text, and @kadal/deck/schema/frontmatter.json is the JSON Schema for frontmatter.

In your editor

• VS Code extension (Marketplace): a live preview that follows your cursor, a slide outline you drag to reorder, IntelliSense for every setting and component, the deck's checks as problems, and formatting.
• @kadal/prettier-plugin: Prettier for deck files, in any editor that runs Prettier. kadal-deck format runs the same formatter with no setup.
• In the browser: press E in kadal-deck dev for a side editor on the slide you're on.

How it works

Each slide is its own module, so an edit re-renders one slide, not the deck. The drawing is an Excalidraw file, drawn with the same sketch DSL a slide's <Sketch> uses.

Hosted or self-hosted

Writing, presenting, the presenter view, export and a static build need nothing but this engine, and stay free. The live room needs a server holding a WebSocket per deck.

• deck.kadal.cc: npx kadal-deck publish gives the deck a URL, a live room, analytics, passcodes, version history and teams, and quick edit on the web that kadal-deck pull merges back into your files slide by slide. There is a free plan, and the paid plans fund the engine.
• Your own host: kadal-deck build output runs on any static host (kadal-deck ci writes the deploy files for GitHub Pages, Netlify, Vercel, Cloudflare or Docker). The room protocol is typed in @kadal/deck/protocol and documented endpoint by endpoint, and kadal-deck relay gives a static build the phone remote.

Packages

All @kadal/* packages version together and are published from this repository's release workflow through npm trusted publishing, with provenance on each npm page. The VS Code extension is published by its own workflow.

Documentation

Getting started · Writing slides · Components · Configuration · CLI · Publishing · Writing a theme · Coming from Slidev

The engine's full reference, with every component and option, is in packages/deck/README.md, and npx kadal-deck info prints it in the terminal.

Licence

AGPL-3.0-or-later. Presenting with Kadal Deck, self-hosting your own decks, and embedding a deck in a site you publish trigger nothing; you owe nobody anything. If you run a modified engine as a network service, its users must be able to get your modified source.

Building a hosted or proprietary product on the engine without publishing your changes? A commercial licence removes the AGPL obligations: write to [email protected]. Details are in LICENSING.md. The five ported themes are MIT, and third-party notices are in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.

Contributing

A bug report with a small deck.mdx that reproduces it is the most useful thing you can send, and pull requests are welcome. CONTRIBUTING.md covers the setup (Bun 1.3+), the tests and the island verifier. Questions and ideas go to Discussions. Please follow the code of conduct, and report security issues privately as SECURITY.md describes.

Sponsors

Sponsorships pay for time on the open-source engine: issues, docs, new islands and the features you ask for. Sponsor Kadal Deck on GitHub; the tiers and what each one gets are on deck.kadal.cc/sponsor, and backers are listed in BACKERS.md. Companies can sponsor by invoice.