What is Tachyonn?

Tachyonn is a desktop application for creating and presenting slides. You write your talk in a small, readable text format — the .tac file — and Tachyonn renders it into a finished presentation in real time.

If you've ever felt that slide software gets in your way — fighting with text boxes, re-aligning bullet points, hunting for the right shade of blue — Tachyonn takes a different path. You describe what goes on each slide, and the tool takes care of how it looks.

Where the name comes from

Tachyonn takes its name from the Greek tachýs (ταχύς), meaning "swift" — the same root as tachyon, the hypothetical particle that travels faster than light. The name is the whole philosophy in one word: write fast.

That means short texts with few words and a lot of expressiveness. It means not paying the compile time of LaTeX or Pandoc every time you want to see a change. And it means not dragging along the heavy build of Slidev or the verbosity of Reveal.js. You write a line, you see a slide — at the speed of light.

Where the orange comes from

Tachyonn's signature color — the warm orange #FF5F1F you see throughout — comes from the magnificent color of the Brasília sky at dusk. The capital of Brazil is famous for its vast, glowing sunsets, and that fire-orange horizon became the brand. It's the default theme's primary color, and a small homage to where the project was born.

Who is it for?

Tachyonn was built with a few kinds of people in mind:

• Researchers and teachers who give technical talks often and want them to look consistent every time.
• People who think in text and would rather write than drag boxes around.
• Anyone who versions their work with Git and wants slides that diff cleanly.
• Presenters who can't rely on internet in the room — everything works offline.

You don't need to be a programmer to use it. The syntax is closer to writing an email with some Markdown than to writing code.

The ideas behind it

A few principles guide every design decision in Tachyonn. Knowing them helps the rest of the documentation make sense.

Convention over configuration. The default result already looks good. You only write the things that differ from the default, so most slides stay short and clean.

Shortcuts over verbosity. You type **bold**, not \textbf{bold}. You write <c> to center an image instead of spelling out align="center". Less typing, less clutter.

One source, many looks. The same .tac file can be rendered with different themes and layouts without touching the content. Change the theme, and the whole deck restyles itself.

Performance is the priority. The entire deck is computed once, when the file loads. While you're actually presenting, nothing is calculated on the fly — so there's no stutter, no lag, no surprises.

Completely offline. There is no HTTP server running behind your presentation and no dependency on the cloud. Everything happens locally through the native app.

How it works, briefly

You don't need to understand the internals to use Tachyonn, but a quick mental model helps:

your-file.tac
     │
     ▼   Parser (written in Rust)
 a structured description of your slides (JSON)
     │
     ▼   Renderer (Vue + Nuxt)
 the slides you see on screen

The parser never produces HTML — it only describes what your slides contain. The renderer never reads .tac — it only knows how to draw that description. Because the two halves are cleanly separated, themes and layouts can change freely without ever touching the language itself.

What's available today

Tachyonn is under active development. Here's an honest snapshot of what works right now:

Feature	Status
Full .tac parser	✅ Done
Eleven slide layouts	✅ Done
Automatic cover slide	✅ Done
Theme system (built-in + .tt files)	✅ Done
Bundled fonts (Atkinson Hyperlegible + Momo Trust Display + JetBrains Mono, offline)	✅ Done
Configurable footer	✅ Done
Presenter mode	✅ Done
Whiteboard & drawing tools	✅ Done
Network sharing (QR code)	✅ Done
Click-by-click animations (+)	✅ Done
Speaker notes	✅ Done
Section navigation (Shift + arrows)	✅ Done
Hot-reload in preview mode	✅ Done
Preview tools (style inspector, export)	✅ Done
PDF export	✅ Done
LaTeX / KaTeX math	🔜 Planned
Per-line code highlighting	🔜 Planned

Ready to build something? Head to First Steps.