bento README

The project's README from github.com/nyblnet/bento. As one markdown file: README.md.

Bento

Bento — the office suite that fits in a file

This PowerPoint alternative is a single HTML file. A Bento deck carries its own viewer, presenter, and editor inside the document — open it in any browser, edit it, present it, send it. The person you send it to needs nothing: the file is the software.

Try it in 10 seconds: open bento.page/slides — that's the entire app, running on a starter deck that doubles as the feature tour. Or grab a designed template from the gallery and make it yours.

Download the app: grab the single Bento_Slides.bento.html from the GitHub Releases page or straight from bento.page (~560 KB, no account, no installer). Open it in any modern browser and it is the editor. Save, and it rewrites itself with your deck inside.

Why this exists

Office documents used to be things you had. Now they're things you rent — locked in someone's cloud, behind someone's login, readable only while a company keeps its servers on. Bento takes the other path:

What's inside

Feature Description
Morph presenting Elements that share an id animate between slides — position, size, color, even gradients. Duplicate a slide, rearrange, and the motion designs itself.
Live collaboration E2EE (AES-GCM) with keys that live in your file, never on a server. The file itself is the invitation: anyone who opens a copy joins. Offline edits merge back precisely — our own CRDT, character-level text merging included.
A blind relay The optional sync relay (server/sync-worker/) stores ciphertext and learns nothing. Read the source; it's about one file.
Charts, built in Bar / line / pie / scatter drawn by our own dependency-free engine, live during presentations: tooltips, zoom, and data that morphs when a bar chart becomes a pie.
Designed for AI The document is plain JSON in the file, so agents edit .bento.html files in place and chatbots round-trip the JSON (window.bento.loadDoc). See docs/agents.md.
Signed self-updates Releases are ECDSA-signed and offered in-app. Updating writes a new file — the old one stays as your rollback. No server ever touches your documents.
Everything else Speaker view, comments, layouts, hidden interactive states, hover reveals, motion paths, PDF export, page sizes, 8 UI languages — in a ~560 KB shell.

Use it with AI

Because the document is plain JSON living in one plaintext block near the top of the file, any assistant that can read and write a file can edit your deck — no plugin, no API. Two ways in:

It works fully offline with local open-weight models — point Ollama, llama.cpp, or LM Studio at the deck and nothing leaves your machine. The agent guide is a single page you can drop into any model's context: bento.page/agents.md (also in this repo at docs/agents.md).

Architecture in one paragraph

slides/src/model.ts defines the JSON document model; one renderer (render.ts) draws it for the editor canvas, thumbnails, and present mode (Reveal.js drives navigation; morphs are computed from the model, not the DOM). Animation is an in-house engine (anim.ts), charts are in-house (charts.ts), collaboration is an in-house CRDT (sync/crdt.ts — pure data, fuzz-tested by scripts/test-sync.ts across hundreds of thousands of convergence checks). The shell compresses to ~560 KB with the document block left as plaintext so old files and outside tools can always splice it. The deep dive: docs/architecture.md.

Security model, honestly

Build from source

Node 20+ and npm are all you need — the app is a single-page build with no backend to stand up.

cd slides
npm install
npm run dev            # dev server (http://localhost:5173)
npm run build:single   # → dist-single/Bento_Slides.bento.html (the product)

node scripts/test-sync.ts runs the CRDT convergence rig. Releases are cut locally so the signing key never leaves the maintainer's machine — see docs/RELEASING.md.

Where to read more

Contributions welcome — start with CONTRIBUTING.md. Found a security issue? See SECURITY.md.

Community

Planning a substantial contribution? Check the pinned What's in flight issue and the open PRs first, and say what you're planning before you build it — see CONTRIBUTING.md.

Roadmap

bento/slides is the first app — a PowerPoint alternative, shipping now. bento/spaces (notes), bento/dash (sheets & tables) and bento/vault follow, each as its own self-contained .bento.html distributable. The current release lives on bento.page and reaches every existing file through the signed update channel.

License

Bento is open source under the MIT License — all software here is MIT, © 2026 The Bento authors. Bundled runtime components (reveal.js, Moveable, Selecto) are MIT; the embedded typefaces (Fraunces, Instrument Sans) are OFL; gallery imagery is public-domain (see scripts/gallery-photos/SOURCES.md). Each component keeps its own license.

bento (nyblnet/bento)

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5.5K ·GitHub
Bento
What is this?Bento is a PowerPoint-style presentation app that lives entirely inside a single HTML file - the deck, editor, viewer, and presenter are all bundled together, so opening the file in a browser is the whole app.
Is this a desktop app I install, or just a file I open?It's just a file - download the single BentoSlides.bento.html (~560KB), open it in any modern browser, and that file becomes the editor; saving rewrites the same file with your deck inside.
How do I start using it?Try it instantly at bento.page/slides, which runs a starter deck that doubles as the feature tour, or grab a designed template from the gallery, edit it in the browser, and save - no install and no account needed.
Do I need to install anything to open or share a deck?No - whoever you send a deck to needs nothing, since the .bento.html file itself is the software; building Bento from source only requires Node 20+ and npm.
What's the catch with live collaboration?Undo during live collaboration is snapshot-based, so undoing can revert a collaborator's concurrent edit to the same property; editing is designed desktop-first, though decks still view and present fine on phones.
Where does my data actually go?Your document data sits as plain, readable JSON inside the file itself; switching on Offline mode keeps everything local by hard-blocking updates and collaboration, and even the optional sync relay only ever sees encrypted ciphertext, never your content.
What is 'morph presenting'?Elements that share the same id animate between slides automatically - position, size, color, even gradients - so duplicating and rearranging a slide designs the transition for you.
Can AI assistants edit a Bento deck?Yes - since the deck's document model is plain JSON in one block of the file, agents like Claude Code, Cursor, or Aider can edit it directly in the filesystem, and any chatbot can round-trip the copied JSON; Claude Code even gets a packaged bento-slides skill from the project's plugin marketplace.
Are the charts built with a library like Chart.js?No - bar, line, pie, and scatter charts are drawn by Bento's own dependency-free charting engine, and they stay live during presentations with tooltips, zoom, and morph transitions between chart types.
Why build a new file format instead of just using PowerPoint?The goal is a document that outlives any cloud service - a deck saved in 2026 should still open in 2036 - so fonts, images, charts, and the editor all travel together in one plain, readable file instead of being locked behind an account or a binary format.
What are similar projects?ppt-master, Office-Tool, VibeOffice, univer, pdfcraft, excalidraw, dashi-ppt-skill, trade-journal
Which topics is it in?office-tools, slideshow, office365, e2ee, powerpoint, pdf-generation, single-page-app, office, slides, mit-license, presentation, charts
Creator
nyblnet
Size
53 MB
Stars
5.5K
Updated
CommitOct 17Releasev1.2.9Oct 17
Age
3mo
Commits · 90 Days