We’ve been using Keynote to create our presentations since we started Kisko Labs back in 2007. Keynote is nice and you can create really stunning presentations with it, but it’s not modular, and it’s kind of slow to create simple presentations with it.

For a year or so, we have been using Deckset to create most of our presentations. Deckset uses Markdown and allows you to use which ever text editor you want. It automatically converts your plain text to beautifully themed and positioned presentation.

Deckset is not perfect. There are is lot of information in our presentations that we need to use again and again. Our only solution has been to copy and paste the information to the new presentation each time we start to create one.

This got me thinking. What if we would have re-usable partials for content? That would make everything so much easier and faster. Last weekend I decided to give it a try and program something that would allow us to do just that.

Kisko Suits

Kisko Suits is a command line utility that watches a config file (.suits) and compiles a master markdown document for Deckset (and automatically refreshes the presentation in Deckset). Kisko Suits allows us to use re-usable partials (for example company intro, CVs, contact information).

You can install Kisko Suits with ‘gem install kisko-suits’. Code and usage instructions are available at Github.