CodeShow: Code Sharing for Technical Presenters

I give a lot of technical presentations, and one thing I continually struggle with is how to show code samples on a big screen. Like many speakers, I've sometimes pasted code into PowerPoint and sometimes opened up Visual Studio or Sublime Text in full-screen mode with a zoomed font. I've found neither to be ideal.

Recently, I was asked to give a full day of Windows Azure training, and I decided it was finally time to build a tool for this. The result is CodeShow, a Python-based command-line tool that turns a directory of code into a static website.

You can see a sample of its output at codeshow.site44.com. Notice the large font, the light-on-dark color scheme, and the friendly line wrapping. Also notice that lines are highlighted as you mouse over them. All of this is designed around the requirements of a big-screen presentation.

Because CodeShow generates websites, they can be easily published, giving attendees of your talk the ability to read along with you on their own laptops or revisit code samples later. CodeShow also understands readme files (in Markdown or plain text), making the samples more usable as standalone websites.

Naturally, I'm using Site44 to host the static websites I create, and CodeShow even has a --site44 option that uses extensionless URLs and Site44's custom mime types instead.