demo-nav

The main goal of this small lib is to enable clear, reproducible, scripted and structured live demo presentations, without sacrificing the flexibility.

Why flexibility matters? It is almost always the case that you need to adjust the presentation on the fly, e.g:

• You did some sequence of commands too fast and you need to retry.
• In the Q&A someone asks you to explain certain commands in sequence.
• You are short on time and you want to skip few less important parts of demo.
• Something unexpected happen. You want to pause the flow and continue after quick fix.

You can find a video of the live demos I performed using this handy tool at FOSDEM 2019 here & recent GrafanaCon2019 talk here

Features:

• Script whole demo as ordered set of commands.
• Hide irrelevant details: execute one command, but show different (e.g simplified) command. Must have when you are short of time.
• Executed command stays on the screen (if chosen) to guide the audience on what was invoked.
• Once demo started, NO typing is required! Navigate through commands using single keyboard keys:
  • Execute written command by pressing enter.
  • Skip current command and get to the previous one by pressing p.
  • Skip current command and get to the next one by pressing n.
  • Skip current command and get to the beginning of demo by pressing b.
  • Skip current command and get to the end of demo by pressing e.
  • Quit by pressing q or Ctrl+C.
• Once exitted, script will remember the last position, which allows easy continuation.
• Optionally mimick the typing if really need to ;>

Tested on:

• Ubuntu 18.04, zsh 5.4.2-3ubuntu3.1 (CI tests in progress)

Oh My.. Why shell?

I am asking this question myself everyday as well (: It's ugly, and it does not work on every platform. But it is quick to adjust and iterate. Also, natively you run the commands in terminal anyway so that's why - no need for yet another DSL. Python might be a better fit?

Note that I am not a bash magician, so happy to take contributions to improve this lib - as long as functionality stays the same.

How to use it?

• Import demo-nav.sh in your bash script: . demo-nav.sh
• Use r or rc to register commands.
• Invoke navigate at the very end.
• Run your script.

See full example demo script with docs

Credits

This was initially inspired by https://github.com/paxtonhare/demo-magic, so kudos to @paxtonhare