Secondary Action

[psionic-k]

The idea of a "secondary action" is to allow taking branches, doing "something else" on a slide, perhaps multiple times while interacting with an audience.

Unless you expose this as a command, there is no way to quickly do it. Unless this command or function lives behind a third button, there is no way to encode the idea into few enough buttons to live on a presentation remote control. Many presentation controllers I looked at on Amazon have three buttons. A third button is a good idea. The implementation would overload dslide-deck-start when a presentation is already active. dslide-deck-start is already overloaded for showing the contents.

We cannot tolerate a world where presenters using Emacs are bound to the podium while presenters using inferior software are free to maneuver around a stage using a head-mic and giving TED talks. We need secondary actions that work with presentation remote controls.

[psionic-k]

There are a number of cases where a presentation step failure is caught. We could provide a decent interface for error recovery even when 20ft away from the computer.

I propose the following command mapping during errors:

• dslide-deck-backward -> retry
• dslide-deck-forward -> skip
• dslide-deck-start -> debug

Debug would be the "secondary" action in this case.

This only works for up to three options, and if we ever support more, I will need to do something like create a transient that can be navigated with arrows and show that as the secondary action. Since transient supports arrow key navigation, we can pull this off.