Is there a way to have a vs-like preview using marp-cli?

[boborbt]

I’m transitioning from Visual Studio Code to Neovim and am using marp-cli to preview slides as I develop them. While marp-cli -s is excellent for presenting slides, the continuous scrolling preview in VSCode is more suitable for development.

Is there a way to make marp-cli to provide a preview similar to the VSCode one? Or is there any other solution? The nvim markdown-preview plugin is great, but it does not support marp (I tried looking at how to add marp support to it, but it is largely unmaintained and many libraries are old and not compatible with modern marp libraries).

If this isn’t possible, what is the most efficient and effective approach to developing this feature? I’m new to the ecosystem and would greatly appreciate any guidance from the maintainers to help me get started.

Thanks in advance! 😊

[yhatt]

In Marp CLI, using the bare template through --template bare option may provide the most similar view as VS Code. It just aligns slides in vertical and you can scroll it.
https://github.com/marp-team/marp-cli#bare-template

But unlike VS Code, the slide will be snapped into the browser window to be helpful for actual presentation.

If you want to build your own custom viewer for Marp slides, it's recommended to use Marp Core. If you want to create a VS Code-style view, it can be implemented with a few dozen lines of code:

• Example: https://jsfiddle.net/90dga68k/
• Related: How to render markdown presentation in browser using marp? #480

[boborbt]

Thanks to your advice, I’ve created an npm project that does what I was aiming for.
If anyone’s interested, the repo is here: boborbt/marp-dev-preview.

@yhatt — do you think it would be very difficult to support live editing similar to VS Code?
I’m considering writing a proper Neovim plugin for it, but that only makes sense if live editing can be done without reloading the entire slide deck on every keystroke.

Do you know how feasible it would be to hook into Marp Core to provide that functionality?
My impression is that it could be a big undertaking, but since much of the heavy lifting has already been done in Marp itself, I’m hopeful it might not be too complicated.

[yhatt]

As a preface, I'm not very familiar with Neovim or Lua script, a general way to extend Neovim. But It looks like not too difficult to implement live Marp rendering, considering that many Neovim plugins have achieved live rendering, e.g. markdown-preview.nvim, live-preview.nvim, and so on.

[boborbt]

Thank you, @yhatt. My initial concern was mainly about where to start on the Marp side, but I found inspiration in one of your GitHub projects. I ended up taking a different approach, but your work definitely helped show me it would be doable.

Over the past few days, I’ve been working on a plugin, and today I pushed a version that supports incremental updates. It’s still a bit rough around the edges, but it’s working quite well (IMHO).

For anyone interested, the plugin is called marp-dev-preview.nvim.