oraide 0.1

A tool to spare presenters the risky proposition of entering terminal commands and giving a presentation at the same time.

Oraide is a tool to spare presenters the risky proposition of entering terminal commands and giving a presentation at the same time. Oraide replays presentation scripts composed of notes and terminal commands into a GNU Screen session. In addition to presentations, it’s also useful for recording screencasts.

The name Oraide is a portmanteau of orate and aide.

Usage

Before giving your presentation, prepare a script file. A script file looks like this:

# connect to the remote server
ssh host-name

# create a new file
echo 'Hello, World!' >> hello_world.txt

# Read the file.
# And by that I mean cat it.
cat hello_world.txt

# Background activity
1: ssh host-name
1: rm hello_world.txt

Script files are interpreted by these rules:

• Blank lines are ignored.

• Lines starting with a hash are presenters notes. They’re not executed.

• All other lines are commands to be sent to the Screen session. If such a line starts with a number and a colon, the command is sent to the Screen window of the name number. Otherwise, the command is sent to window 0.

Once you have a script ready, you can run Oraide. Running Oraide requires a script and a Screen session as command line arguments. Thus, run Oraide like To run the script against a specific Screen session like so: oraide script session, where script and session are the name of the Oraide script and Screen sessions respectively. For example, to run a script named conference on a Screen session named demo, enter oraide conference demo.

So, a complete example would look something like this:

$ screen -S demo
# put that screen session on the projector
# open a new terminal session on your laptop display
$ oraide my_great_presentation demo
Starting my_great_presentation. Press ENTER to advance script.