Markdown slides are a brilliant idea, but the tools often get in the way: Obsidian’s core Slides plugin feels too limited, while Marp can turn a simple presentation into an exercise in technical details and scripting.
PowerPoint is great for designing slides. Markdown is great for writing, structuring ideas, and revising the content.
I wanted a visual way to work on a presentation while keeping the content in an ordinary Markdown file. Obsidian’s built-in Slides can show the note, but I was missing the overview: seeing the slides, arranging their order, and keeping presenter notes nearby.
So I built Just Simple Slides.
It uses the familiar --- separator and adds:
- Slide thumbnails with drag-and-drop reordering.
- Automatic layouts: text and images sit side by side; image-only slides display the image large and centered. Content scales to fit.
- Your Obsidian theme: backgrounds, colors, and fonts come from your existing setup.
- Native Markdown editing: the slide view opens in a separate tab. Edit source takes you to the selected slide in your existing Markdown editor, including another Obsidian window.
- Private presenter notes, edited below the preview.
- Fullscreen presentation mode with keyboard navigation.
Private notes use optional callouts:
> [!slide] Notes
> Show the demo here.
> Leave time for questions.
You can have several of these per slide, with optional names. They stay in the Markdown file but are hidden from slide previews and presentations. Other callout types remain visible.
The focus today is the editing workflow. Presentation mode is basic; future work will add simple, optional animations and transitions while keeping the plugin minimalist.
It’s open source. Screenshots, installation instructions, and a demo are on GitHub.
Links - GitHub Repo and Obsidian Community Listing