Essential Concepts

Welcome to Tachyonn, a language built for one job: turning your ideas into well-structured slides, fast. Unlike a general-purpose markup language, Tachyonn knows it's making a presentation — so it can take care of layout details you'd otherwise fuss over by hand.

Before diving into specific syntax, it helps to understand two ideas that everything else builds on: blocks and markup signals.

Everything is a block

In Tachyonn, every piece of content is a block — a self-contained unit that lands on a slide. A heading is a block. A paragraph is a block. So are lists, images, code samples, and quotes.

Why does this matter? Because it changes how you think about your slides. You don't position things; you simply write blocks in order, and Tachyonn arranges them for you. You concentrate on what you're saying, and the tool decides how it's laid out. Stack the blocks; the slide takes shape on its own.

Markup signals

To tell one kind of block from another, Tachyonn watches for small markup signals — the same lightweight characters you may know from Markdown. A few examples:

# at the start of a line signals a heading (and therefore a new slide).
-, *, or + signals a list item.
> signals a quote (while >[n]{…} / <[n]{…} is an animation).
` wraps inline code.

Each block type has its own signal, and the rest of this section walks through them one at a time. You can jump straight to Slides, Paragraphs, Lists, Animations, or Labels.

Functions: when a symbol isn't enough

Some content needs a little more than a single symbol — a link with a label, an image with a caption, a footnote. For these, Tachyonn uses functions, written as an identifier followed by parameters in brackets:

&[https://www.tachyonn.org, Visit the site]

The most common functions have short, single-character names — & for links, ! for images — so they stay quick to type. The Functions section covers them all.

A gentle on-ramp

You do not need to memorize everything here. Most presentations use headings, paragraphs, lists, and the occasional image. Start with those, and reach for the rest only when you need them.