Kova

Kova turns plain Markdown into polished slides — with live preview, multiple layouts, theming, and PPTX, PDF, and HTML export — all in a native desktop app.

Features

• Markdown-first — write slides in plain text, separated by ---
• Live preview — editor and preview stay in sync as you type
• Auto layout — title, section, split, two-column, grid, quote, full-bleed, and more
• Themes — 11 built-in themes, community themes, and custom YAML
• Math, code & diagrams — KaTeX math, highlight.js syntax highlighting, and Mermaid charts
• Icons — ` shortcodes (e.g. `) from a bundled Nerd Fonts symbol set, carried through to PPTX export
• Rich media — images, local video, YouTube embeds, and QR codes
• Fullscreen presentation — keyboard and click navigation, plus a presenter view with speaker notes, next-slide preview, and an elapsed or countdown timer
• Build-reveal animations — mark a bullet, image, or other element with `` to reveal it on its own click, in presentation, the interactive HTML export, and native PowerPoint builds
• Export — PowerPoint (16:9 and 4:3, including build animations), PDF (with speaker notes and multi-slide handouts), and standalone HTML
• Import — convert Marp decks, PowerPoint files, or a web page URL into Kova Markdown
• Computed tables — annotate a table with !sheet and write formulas in the cells (=qty * unit, =sum(total)); Kova computes them, the source keeps only the formulas. See [examples/sheet-basics.md](examples/sheet-basics.md)

Command line

Kova also runs from a terminal (kova --help for all options):

Keybindings

To customise, edit your keybindings file (created automatically on first launch), or open it from Settings → Keyboard Shortcuts → Open file.

Custom themes follow the same base path, under a themes/ subfolder. Full reference on the Keyboard Shortcuts (opens in a new tab) wiki page.

Themes

Theme library — open the Inspector, expand Theme, and click More Themes… to browse and install community themes from the KovaMD/Themes (opens in a new tab) repository. Each download is verified against a SHA-256 checksum. Installed themes appear in the picker immediately.

Custom themes — place YAML theme files in the themes/ subfolder of your config directory (see Keybindings above for platform paths). They appear in the Inspector alongside built-in themes. See the Themes (opens in a new tab) wiki page for the full YAML format.