Presenter Mode

Tap's presenter mode gives you a powerful dual-window setup: your audience sees the presentation while you see speaker notes, a timer, and a preview of upcoming slides.

How Presenter Mode Works

Presenter mode creates two synchronized views of your presentation:

1. Audience View (/) - The full-screen presentation your audience sees
2. Presenter View (/presenter) - Your private control panel with notes, timer, and navigation

Both views stay perfectly in sync. Advance the slide in either window and the other follows automatically, including the revealed fragments and the current step, so the presenter's current-slide panel always shows exactly what the audience sees.

Opening a window mid-talk

When a new browser window connects while a talk is already underway, it either picks up the live slide or keeps its own, depending on the URL:

• No slide number in the URL (e.g. opening /presenter fresh) - it lands on whatever slide, fragment, and step the talk is currently on.
• A deep link to the same slide (e.g. reloading on /#12 while the talk is on slide 12) - it takes the live fragment, step, and scroll position, so a reload keeps the fragments you've already revealed.
• A deep link to a different slide (e.g. sharing /#12 while the talk has moved on to slide 20) - the link wins. That window stays on slide 12 in its initial state and won't jump to slide 20 until you actually navigate it.

The hash is weighed against the hub's state only on the first state message after a page load. A dropped connection that comes back sends another one, and every later message wins outright, so a presenter whose laptop reconnects mid-talk snaps to where the audience actually is instead of being pulled back to the hash it happened to load on.

The hub does not remember a theme as part of that state, so a window that reconnects keeps whatever theme it was set to. It also refuses a slide index that is negative or past the last slide, so a stale or malformed message cannot send a viewer off the end of the deck.

The dev server remembers the live slide, fragment, and step for 10 minutes after the last window closes, so reloading the only open window mid-talk lands back where you were rather than on slide 1. (Set TAP_HUB_STATE_RETENTION to a Go duration such as 0s or 30s on the tap dev process to change it; it exists for tests, not for presenting.)

A PDF export (?print=true) never takes part in this at all: it's a static snapshot of one slide and never connects to the live talk, so exporting while a viewer is open can't pull a live slide into the screenshots.

Starting Presenter Mode

# Start the dev server
tap dev presentation.md

# Open presenter view in a new tab or window
# Navigate to http://localhost:3000/presenter

Keyboard Shortcut

Press S during the presentation to open the presenter view in a new window.

Presenter View Features

The presenter view includes everything you need to deliver a polished presentation:

Layouts

Not every talk wants the same screen. Pick one of five layouts from the button in the presenter header, which shows the current layout and a small diagram of it:

Layout	Id	What it shows
Standard	standard	A big current slide on the left, the next slide and the notes on the right. This is the default.
Notes first	notes-first	The notes take most of the width; both slides shrink to small cues. For a talk you read from.
Duo	duo	The current and next slides at equal size, with the notes on a strip below. For demos and builds.
Slide only	slide-only	The current slide alone, as a confidence monitor. No notes, no look-ahead.
Notes only	notes-only	The notes fill the screen. The projector already has the slide.

Press V to cycle to the next layout without opening the menu. While the menu is open, 1 to 5 jump straight to a layout, and Esc closes the menu. Digits do nothing while the menu is closed.

On a screen narrower than 768px, Duo and Slide only are dropped, because two slides side by side do not fit a phone. The menu opens as a sheet at the bottom of the screen rather than under the header, within reach of a thumb. If your saved layout is one of the two wide ones, a narrow screen shows Notes first instead and switches back when the window is wide again.

Your choice is kept per device, in this browser, across every deck. A deck can suggest a starting layout with the presenterLayout frontmatter key:

---
title: Quarterly Results
presenterLayout: notes-first
---

That is only a suggestion. Once you have picked a layout on a device, that device keeps your choice and ignores the deck's. For a one-off, add ?layout=notes-only to the presenter URL; it wins over both and is never saved.

Speaker Notes

Your notes appear in the right column of the presenter view, under the next slide preview, and use all the height the preview leaves. The current slide takes the wider left column. Add notes to any slide using the notes directive:

# Quarterly Results

Revenue grew 23% year over year.

<!--
notes: |
  - Mention the new product launch in Q2
  - Highlight the APAC expansion
  - Transition to next quarter goals
-->

Notes are shown as plain text with their line breaks and blank lines preserved, so write them as short lines or a small list. Markdown is not rendered there: **bold** shows as **bold**. A notes comment anywhere in the slide works too, and is the better form for long free text. See Slide Directives.

To change the notes font size, press - or =, or use the A- and A+ buttons in the notes panel title. The presenter view remembers the size in this browser.

The notes size control in the layout menu offers two ways to size them:

• Manual - one size for the whole deck, the one - and = set. This is the default.
• Fit to panel - each slide's notes are sized to fill the panel without scrolling, up to 6rem. A slide with two lines of notes gets much larger text than one with twenty. In this mode - and = scale that result down to as little as half and back up again, so you can ask for everything a notch smaller without giving up the fitting. Notes too long to fit even at 1rem stay at 1rem and scroll.

Add ?notesSize=fit to the presenter URL to turn fitting on for one session without saving it.

Timer

The presenter view includes a timer:

• Elapsed time - How long you've been presenting
• Current time - The current wall clock time

The elapsed time holds at 0:00 until you first leave the first slide, so a deck you open well before the talk does not count the wait. Press R or click the timer to start it sooner, for an intro you give over the title slide. Once started, it keeps counting, even if you go back to the first slide.

To start the timer as soon as the presenter view opens, turn the setting off:

tap settings set present.startTimerOnFirstAdvance false

The setting lives in ~/.config/tap/settings.yaml, which tap dev, tap present and the Tap desktop app share. In the app, it is Settings > General > Presenting.

Reset Timer

Press R in presenter view to reset the timer to zero.

Next Slide Preview

A preview of the upcoming slide appears in the presenter view, helping you:

• Prepare smooth transitions
• Remember what's coming next
• Avoid surprises during your talk

Current Slide Preview

Your current slide is displayed in the presenter view so you can see exactly what your audience sees without turning around.

Cross-Device Presenter Mode

One of Tap's most powerful features is the ability to control your presentation from a separate device.

Using an iPad or Phone as a Controller

1. Start tap dev --lan on your laptop
2. Connect your iPad/phone to the same network
3. Scan the QR code in the terminal, or open the Network URL it shows
4. Your device becomes a wireless presentation remote

This setup lets you:

• Walk around freely while presenting
• See your notes without looking at your laptop
• Advance slides with the presenter view's on-screen buttons

On a touch device, both views answer to gestures instead of keys: swipe left for the next fragment, step or slide, swipe right to go back, and two-finger tap for the slide overview. A swipe shows the new slide number for a moment, so you can tell the gesture landed even on a deck with no transition.

When the Phone Is Not on the Same Network

A LAN address only works when both devices sit on the same network, and a conference network often stops them talking to each other at all. Start the server with a tunnel instead:

tap dev presentation.md --tunnel

Audience:  http://localhost:3000
Presenter: http://localhost:3000/presenter
Tunnel:    https://plain-shoes-arrive-lately.trycloudflare.com

That address works from anywhere, on any network. It is a Cloudflare Quick Tunnel, so it needs no Cloudflare account, no login and no configuration, and the random name lasts only as long as the server. It does need the cloudflared binary (brew install cloudflared), and --tunnel says so if it is missing.

Press u in the dev terminal to start or stop a tunnel without restarting; the URL appears with a QR code to point a phone at.

Anyone with the link can watch the deck while the tunnel is up. Stop it with u, or stop the server, when you are done.

Why a Tunnel Keeps the Screen On

Both views ask the device to keep the screen awake, so a phone propped up as a prompter does not dim partway through a slide. That request needs a secure context, which means https or localhost.

A phone opening a LAN address over plain http therefore has no wake lock available and its screen dims on its own schedule. Through a tunnel the page is https, and the screen stays on. This is the practical reason to use --tunnel even when both devices are on the same network.

QR Code for Easy Access

The dev server's terminal shows a QR code only when there is a URL worth scanning:

• With --lan, the terminal shows a Network: presenter URL and a QR code for it.
• With --tunnel, it shows the tunnel's QR code instead.
• With neither, it shows no QR code, since only this machine can connect.

tap dev presentation.md --lan

# Output includes:
#   Audience:  http://localhost:3000
#   Presenter: http://localhost:3000/presenter
#   Network:   http://192.168.1.100:3000/presenter
#   [QR CODE]

Scan the QR code with your phone or tablet to instantly open the presenter view.

On Stage

Three things make a live talk safer. None of them need a flag on the deck.

Put the audience window in fullscreen, or open it with ?present=true. Both switch error display to its audience-safe form: a whole-slide component that throws is replaced by the slide's own content, its slots in the default layout, with a small muted component error chip in the corner; an inline one leaves the rest of the slide untouched and the chip marks the gap. Either way the room sees a slide, not a stack trace. Fullscreen is followed live, so entering or leaving it while an error is on screen switches forms straight away. Your presenter view keeps the full message, so you can read what broke while the audience sees a merely plainer slide. Add ?debug=true to any window to force the full card back while you are still authoring.

A window catches up by itself after a restart. The hub tells each window the deck's revision when it connects. A window that reconnects and finds a different revision than it first saw reloads itself, so restarting tap dev, or editing the deck while a window was asleep, no longer leaves a stale slide on the projector.

With a presenter password set, only authenticated windows drive the others. See below.

Password Protection

For sensitive presentations, you can protect the presenter view with a password:

tap dev presentation.md --presenter-password 'secret 123'

The password is a tap dev flag, not a frontmatter key, so it never ends up in the deck file. It may contain any characters; tap URL-encodes it wherever it prints a presenter URL or builds the QR code.

Authenticate once by opening /presenter?key=<password>. Tap answers with a redirect to /presenter with key removed, so the password does not sit in the address bar or in your history, and sets an HttpOnly cookie holding a random session token, never the password itself. After that the presenter view opens without ?key=, which is what makes the S key work: the window it opens inherits the cookie.

Request	Response
No key, no cookie	403 Forbidden: presenter password required. Use ?key=<password>
Wrong key	403 Forbidden: incorrect presenter password
Correct key	302 to /presenter, cookie set
Valid cookie, no key	200

/qr is gated the same way, so the QR code cannot be used to hand out presenter access to anyone who can reach the server. It also needs --lan: without it, its network URLs would not work, and the endpoint answers 404.

When password protection is enabled:

• The audience view (/) remains publicly accessible
• The presenter view (/presenter) requires the password
• Notes and upcoming slides stay private
• Only an authenticated window can drive the others. A window without the cookie still receives every sync and reload message, so it follows along, but its own navigation messages are dropped by the hub. An audience member clicking around moves only their own screen.

With no password set, nothing changes: any connected window can navigate every other one, which is what you want for a rehearsal across two laptops.

WARNING

The password is passed on the command line, so it lands in your shell history. It protects the presenter view on a shared network; it is not a substitute for not serving confidential material.

Presenter Mode Keyboard Shortcuts

In the presenter view:

Shortcut	Action
Right, Down, Space, Enter, PageDown	Next fragment or step, then next slide
Left, Up, Backspace, PageUp	Previous fragment or step, then previous slide
Home / End	First / last slide
R	Reset timer
- / =	Smaller / larger speaker notes, or the fitting scale
V	Next presenter layout
1 to 5	Pick a layout, while the layout menu is open
?	Show or hide the list of shortcuts
Esc	Close the layout menu, or the list of shortcuts

In the audience view:

Shortcut	Action
S	Open the presenter view in a new window
O	Toggle the slide overview
T	Cycle themes
F	Toggle fullscreen
?	Show or hide the list of shortcuts
Esc	Close the overview or the list of shortcuts, or exit fullscreen

The presenter view also has on-screen previous and next buttons, which is what makes it usable from a phone or tablet.

Best Practices

Before Your Talk

1. Test presenter mode on the actual display setup
2. Check network connectivity if using cross-device control
3. Set a password for confidential content
4. Write notes for complex or data-heavy slides

During Your Talk

1. Use the timer to pace yourself
2. Glance at the next slide preview before transitions
3. Keep notes concise - bullet points work better than paragraphs

Tip: Dual Monitor Setup

The ideal setup uses two displays:

1. External display - Shows audience view in fullscreen (press F)
2. Laptop screen - Shows presenter view with notes

This mirrors the classic conference room setup while giving you modern features like cross-device sync.

Next Steps

• Keyboard Shortcuts - Complete shortcut reference
• Writing Slides - Learn about speaker notes syntax
• Building & Export - Export with or without notes