What’s new here

DeckWerk targets Linux as a first-class platform for authoring and presenting talks. It has deep video support: drag, crop, trim, transcode, and present without leaving the editor. It also defines an agent-editing protocol. An AI agent gets a real folder of HTML files to edit; DeckWerk compiles those edits into normal slide objects and records them in History under the agent’s name. No cloud account, no special API, just a shared folder and Node.

What it does

DeckWerk is a WYSIWYG slide editor built on Electron. It stores presentations as folders: the deck metadata plus ordinary video and image files on disk. You drag media onto a slide and edit it in place.

The headless collaboration server (npm run collab) turns any machine into a browser-based editor for a shared folder of decks. Everyone on the same local network or Tailscale tailnet gets live cursors, selections, and edits with no accounts. Binding to a Tailscale address and using tailscale serve adds HTTPS and per-person access control via tailnet identity.

Agent integration works the same way in both modes. The Agent… button either opens the local deck folder directly or copies a prompt that tells an agent how to set up a Node bridge to mirror the remote live folder. The agent writes or edits HTML files under edit/, and DeckWerk compiles them into editable slide objects on save.

Who it’s for

Researchers, lecturers, and engineers who build talks around video clips, diagrams, and images and want a native desktop editor that runs on Linux. Also useful for teams collaborating on presentations inside a lab or company network, and for workflows where an AI coding agent co-authors slides alongside a person.

Try it

Prebuilt releases are available for macOS (arm64 and x64 .dmg/.zip), Linux (.AppImage, .deb, .tar.gz), and Windows (setup.exe) from the v0.2.3 release.

macOS (Homebrew):

brew install --cask vsitzmann/tap/deckwerk
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/DeckWerk.app

Linux (Debian/Ubuntu):

sudo apt install ./deckwerk_*_amd64.deb

From source (requires Node.js 22+, Python 3.10+, and Git):

git clone https://github.com/vsitzmann/deckwerk.git
cd deckwerk
npm ci
npm run dist

Headless collaboration server (from a source checkout):

npm run collab -- /path/to/shared-decks

Listens on port 5800 by default.

How mature is it

Alpha, under active development per the README. 152 stars, 20 forks, 7 contributors, 5 releases. The latest is v0.2.3 (2026-10-09). The repo hit 100+ commits in the 90 days before review and was last pushed 2026-10-16. MIT license.