Presenting

tap present is for giving the talk, not writing it. It serves the deck exactly like tap dev, but it does not reload while you are on stage, and it can record the whole run without you touching a key.

tap present [deck.md] [--port N] [--no-record]

With no file it shows the same picker as tap dev.

How it differs from tap dev

• No file watching. Saving the deck, a component, or a theme does not reload the slides. An editor autosave cannot bump the audience back to slide 1 mid-talk. Press r to reload by hand when you do want the latest version.
• The audience view opens at launch, not the presenter view. Press p to open the presenter view when you need it.
• The editing keys do nothing. a (add slide), i (image), t (theme) and e (PDF export) write to the deck or a file next to it, and none of that belongs in a talk, so they are unbound. The browser's own T shortcut (cycle theme) is off too, so a stray keypress on stage cannot change what the audience sees.

The header reads ● PRESENTING, and the keys that remain are:

Key	Action
o	Open the audience view again
p	Open the presenter view
r	Reload the deck from disk
u	Start or stop the public tunnel
c	Stop the recording, or start a new segment
q	Quit, with a keep prompt when a recording exists
ctrl+c	Quit and keep the recording

Recording every talk automatically

The first time you run tap present on a machine where recording is possible, Tap asks once, before the TUI starts:

Record automatically every time you run tap present? (y/n)

The answer is saved as present.record: true or false in settings.yaml, in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/tap/ or ~/.config/tap/ when that is unset. The setting lives with your machine, never with the deck, so a deck someone else cloned from you cannot turn recording on for them. To change your answer, edit or delete that file; deleting it makes the next run ask again.

Without a terminal attached, Tap does not ask and does not record. --no-record skips recording for one run without touching the saved answer.

If you said no, or the setting has never been asked, pressing c still records: the answer only controls whether recording starts on its own.

Off macOS, recording is not available, so tap present never asks and never records.

What gets recorded

When recording is on, it starts as soon as the server is up, so anything said over the title slide is captured. A run is stored as one folder, named from the deck's slugified title and the local start time:

recordings/my-talk-2026-09-21-1932/
  01.mov
  02.mov
  03.mov
  chapters.txt

Each file is a segment; a new one starts whenever the recorded display changes (see below), or when you press c. When the run ends, Tap finishes the folder for you (see Finishing a recording), and the segments are kept as they are.

chapters.txt covers the whole run, one section per segment headed by the file name:

01.mov
0:00 Title
0:41 Agenda
0:44 Title
02.mov
0:00 Title
0:47 Talk starts
0:47 Agenda
3:12 Live demo

Talk starts marks the last time the deck left the title slide. Clicking through the deck while you get set up, then going back to the title, doesn't count: a later departure replaces the mark, so the entry always reflects when the talk actually began.

Finishing a recording

When you keep a recording, Tap starts a background job that turns the folder into something you can upload. It needs ffmpeg and writes three files next to the segments:

recordings/my-talk-2026-09-21-1932/
  talk.mov             every segment joined, not re-encoded
  talk.mp4             the talk itself, ready for YouTube
  talk-chapters.txt    chapters for talk.mp4, ready to paste into the description
  finish.log           what the job printed

• talk.mov is skipped when there is only one segment, since that file is the talk.
• talk.mp4 starts at the Talk starts mark, or at the beginning when there is none. The video is copied, not re-encoded, so the cut lands on the keyframe at or before the mark and the file can begin a few seconds early. The audio is normalized to -14 LUFS with a true peak of -1 dBTP, the level YouTube plays at, in two passes so the whole talk gets one gain.
• talk-chapters.txt lists the slide chapters in talk.mp4 time, starting at 0:00, with the offsets worked out across segments from each file's real length. Nothing is merged or dropped. chapters.txt is not changed.

The job runs on its own, so quitting Tap does not stop it. A talk of 85 minutes takes a few minutes. Watch finish.log for progress and errors.

Without ffmpeg, Tap keeps the raw files and says so. Install it, then finish the folder by hand. This also works on a recording from an earlier version:

brew install ffmpeg
tap record finish recordings/my-talk-2026-09-21-1932

The deck's recording frontmatter block still applies: output, audio, showClicks, and chapters all work the same as in tap dev. See the Talk Recording guide for that reference. recording.display is ignored, because tap present picks the display itself. There is no time cap or 90 minute warning in tap present, since a meetup evening can run for hours before the talk starts; tap dev keeps both.

Following the projector

Tap records the projector, or any other external display, when one is connected, and the laptop screen otherwise. It checks the display list every 3 seconds.

• Plugging in or swapping the projector starts a new segment on the newly chosen display.
• Unplugging the projector, once one has been seen in this run, pauses recording: nothing is captured until any external display comes back. This keeps the host, another speaker, or your presenter notes off the video during the gap.
• Replugging any external display resumes recording in a new segment.
• A practice run with no projector ever connected records the laptop screen for the whole run.
• Mirroring works normally: whatever picture is shared to the projector is what gets recorded.

While paused, the header shows PAUSED, waiting for projector in place of the recording state.

When disk space runs low

Below 5 GB free, the TUI shows a warning and the audience and presenter views show a small badge: Disk almost full, recording stops at 1 GB. Below 1 GB free, Tap stops the recording, finalizes the file, and the badge changes to Recording stopped: disk full. Press c to start a new segment once you have freed space. This guard runs in both tap dev and tap present.

Quitting

Pressing q asks:

Keep this recording? (Y/n)

Enter, y, or ctrl+c keep the recording. Only n deletes it. esc cancels and goes back to the TUI with the recording still running.

A run that never left the first slide is not a talk, so Tap deletes it without asking and prints:

Deleted the recording: the deck never left the first slide.

Any other kept run prints its folder path, as tap dev does. Inside a git repository, keeping a recording may ask whether to add recordings/ to .gitignore, the same prompt described in the Talk Recording guide.