Markdown to Slides Without the Marp CLI

Writing slides in Markdown is a genuinely good idea that usually comes with an annoying setup step. The standard advice is: install Node, npm install -g @marp-team/marp-cli, then run a command to preview. Or install VS Code and an extension, then find the preview pane.

Both work. Both are a lot of scaffolding for “I want to see my slides.”

What Marp actually is

Marp is a convention, not an application. A Markdown file becomes a presentation when you add one line of front matter:

---
marp: true
---

# Quarterly Review
Vaibhav Kakde · August 2026

---

## What shipped

- Split-mode editor
- Line numbers
- Presentation mode

---

## What's next

Questions?

Two rules, and that’s the whole format:

1. marp: true in a front matter block at the very top marks the file as a deck.
2. --- on its own line separates one slide from the next.

Everything else is ordinary Markdown. Headings, lists, bold, code blocks, images, links — all behave exactly as they would in any other .md file. Which means your deck is still a readable document if someone opens it in a text editor, and it diffs cleanly in git.

Where the CLI actually comes in

The Marp CLI is a build tool. Its job is turning a .md file into distributable output:

marp deck.md --pdf        # export to PDF
marp deck.md --html       # export to a standalone HTML file
marp deck.md --images png # export each slide as an image

That’s genuinely useful when you need to email a PDF or host a deck. It is not needed to write the deck, and it isn’t needed to present it either — a fact that gets lost because most tutorials introduce the CLI in step one.

If your goal is “open this file and talk over it”, you need a renderer, not a build pipeline.

Presenting straight from the file

MDHero renders Marp natively. Open a .md file with marp: true in the front matter and it opens as a slideshow — no Node, no CLI, no extension, no browser tab.

Navigation is what you’d expect from any presentation tool:

Page numbers are optional and can be toggled on. Because MDHero is a Markdown viewer first, the same file opens as an ordinary document when you’re editing it and as a deck when you want to present — no mode juggling, no separate export step.

A deck worth stealing

This is about as much structure as most technical talks need:

---
marp: true
paginate: true
---

# Title of the talk
Your name · Date

---

## The problem

One sentence. Then the evidence.

- Point that supports it
- Another point

---

## What we did

```js
const result = doTheThing()
```

---

## Results

| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Load time | 4.2s | 1.1s |

---

# Thanks

Questions?

paginate: true adds slide numbers. Code blocks and tables render as they would anywhere else, which is most of the appeal — you write a technical deck the same way you’d write technical docs.

When Markdown slides are the wrong tool

Worth being straight about this: Marp gives you very little design control. You get a clean default theme and some CSS if you want to fight for more, but you are not going to build a heavily art-directed keynote this way.

Markdown decks are a good fit for:

• Engineering talks, architecture reviews, internal demos
• Anything that lives in a repo next to the code it describes
• Decks you’ll revise often and want to diff

They’re a poor fit for:

• Sales and marketing decks that need visual polish
• Anything with heavy animation or precise layout
• Collaborative editing with non-technical stakeholders

For the first list the trade is excellent — plain text, version control, and no mouse. For the second, open PowerPoint and don’t feel bad about it.

The point

The Marp format is simple enough to learn in a minute: one front matter line, --- between slides. The friction was never the format — it was the toolchain wrapped around it.

If you only need to write and present, skip the CLI. Put marp: true at the top of a Markdown file and open it in a viewer that renders it. If you later need a PDF to send round, that’s the moment to install the CLI — not before.