Most presentation tools are built for a stage.
Big screen. Captive audience. Clicker in hand.
But what about content people consume on their own — on a phone, at their own pace, whenever it fits into their day?
Slideshows weren't designed for that. Vibedeck was.
Remember index cards?
One idea per card. Focused. Constrained. Sequenced to build understanding without overwhelming.
Students have been using them for centuries because they work — not despite the constraint, but because of it.
Vibedeck brings that model to the web.
A platform for creating and browsing card decks authored in plain markdown.
You write a markdown file. Vibedeck turns it into a beautiful, paginated card experience that works on any device — phone, tablet, desktop, or projected screen.
No special software. No complex tooling. Just markdown and a clear idea.
Vibedeck is not a presentation tool.
It is a reading and learning experience that happens to work beautifully in a presentation context.
The distinction matters. The design decisions — mobile-first, paginated, card-constrained — all follow from that.
Vibedeck supports five card types:
Title — the opening card, large display treatment
Concept — one idea, explained cleanly. The constraint is the feature.
Summary — big picture consolidation, bullet points, palette cleanser between concept runs
Graphic — full image or chart with a caption
Quote — a pull quote, styled distinctively
Every deck is a single markdown file with YAML frontmatter.
Cards are separated by ---. Each card declares its type in its own frontmatter block.
That's the entire format. If you can write markdown, you can author a Vibedeck deck.
You don't have to touch a file at all.
Sign in and the deck builder walks you through it card by card, with the right fields for each card type. Prefer raw markdown? The in-browser editor has a live preview.
Not signed up yet? The sandbox lets anyone paste markdown and preview a deck instantly — nothing is saved, nothing is published.
Readers move through a deck with swipes, arrow keys, or buttons — with a progress indicator and an index for jumping straight to a card.
Authors can tune the feel from frontmatter: a slide or fade transition between cards, and progressive bullet reveal, where each advance surfaces the next point before moving on.
Every author has a public handle and an author page:
vibedeck.online/u/robwall — everything by one author
Within that, decks are grouped by topic:
vibedeck.online/u/robwall/vibedeck — this deck's topic
Each deck also carries keywords for finer-grained thematic grouping within a topic.
Each deck has a visibility setting:
Public — listed in the library, visible to everyone
Unlisted — anyone with the link can read it; it just isn't listed
Private — only you, signed in
And every public deck has an embed widget: a copy-paste snippet that drops the deck into any page that accepts HTML.
Vibedeck is open source under the MIT license.
One codebase, two ways to run it: standalone — just you, on your own server — or server — a multi-user host with sign-ups, like vibedeck.online.
Your deck content stays on your domain, building your authority, not ours. vibedeck.online is the proof of concept. Your instance is the point.
Architectural decisions and editorial judgment by a human. Execution assisted by a very carefully guided code djinni.
The constraint is the feature. One idea per card, sequenced to build understanding without overwhelm.
— The Vibedeck design philosophy