Deck themes

A deck's look is its theme. Neko ships three, set per deck with theme: in the presentation: block, or for every deck in a build with --theme.

Theme Geometry Look
midnight A responsive column that fills the window Deep navy ground, blueprint grid, a geometric display face, a reading serif and a mono. The default.
daylight The same as midnight The same type on warm paper.
curiosity A fixed 1920 x 1080 canvas scaled to the window as one piece The Curiosity brand: paper and ink with stone and slate, a deep blue and one electric-blue signal, Schibsted Grotesk and Geist Mono, hairlines and square corners.
---
title: Quarterly review
presentation:
  theme: curiosity
---

Re-theming a build: --theme

neko build and neko watch take --theme <name>. Every deck in that build uses the named theme, whatever its front matter says, so the same Markdown can be rendered in another look without touching a file:

neko build --theme curiosity
neko watch --theme midnight

An unknown name stops the build with an error and a non-zero exit code rather than falling back to the default.

What the curiosity theme adds

Everything a deck already does works in every theme. The curiosity theme reads three more slide attributes, set on the --- separator like eyebrow and accent, and draws page furniture of its own: the eyebrow with its two-square mark at the top left, the Escape mark at the bottom left and the page number at the bottom right. The control bar and the back control fade out while the pointer is still, and come back when it moves.

layout

Layout What it is
default Eyebrow, headline, content under it.
cover The deck title large on the left (*second part* of it in the signal colour), the lead and the chips on the right, a band of art along the foot.
section A section divider: eyebrow, # title and a line, at the foot of the slide; the art above.
section-panel The same, with the art on a deep blue panel on the right (class="panel-left" moves the panel left and the text to the top).
statement One sentence, set large, at the foot of the slide.
split Headline on the left, lead on the right, the rest (stats, columns) across the foot.
aside Headline and lead on the left, the content (steps, rows, a table) on the right.
number One ::: stat, set huge, with its label and context beside it.
closing The call: a large headline on the deep blue, a contact line, a row of stats and the wordmark.

In midnight and daylight these layouts fall back to the ordinary column.

ground

The slide's surface: paper (the default), stone, ink, slate or deep (the deep blue). Type, rules and art follow the ground. ::: box, ::: stat and ::: step take a ground too.

art

Art drawn from numbers rather than image files, placed by the layout. It is an inline SVG coloured by the theme, so it reads on any ground; midnight and daylight draw it in their own palette.

art What it draws
field A grid of short dashes bending round one signal square.
bars Rows of short bars with a rising band of them lit.
stair A diagonal band of bars climbing to the right.
squares A grid of squares turning toward one point, the nearest one the signal.
glyph A 4 by 4 pixel glyph with one marked cell. Pick one with glyph=.

glyph takes a name (connected, resolved, traceable, sovereign, fast, open, precise, curious, graph, retrieval, permissions, models, connectors, agenda) or 16 cells read row by row: k a cell, o the marked cell, . empty — glyph="k..o.kk..kk.k..k". seed= varies the bars.

--- {layout="cover" art="field" eyebrow="Event · Month 2026"}

# Deck title, line one *line two*

One sentence on what this deck is for and who it is for.

[!tag text="Presenter name" tone="solid"] [!tag text="Team"]

The templates deck

Curiosity slide templatesOpen presentation
Every layout and component of the curiosity theme — covers, sections, statements, steps, numbers, timelines, quotes, comparisons and the closing call — from one Markdown file.

The deck's source, presentations/decks/curiosity-templates.md in this repository, is the quickest way to start one: copy the slides you need.