Knowledge Base & Slidev

VMark can serve your whole workspace as a browsable, cross-linked knowledge base, and preview/export Slidev presentation decks — both powered by a single local content server that VMark starts on demand.

Status

This feature is rolling out in phases, and no release build on any platform includes the content-server runtime it depends on — see Requirements. Because of that it is hidden unless Developer Mode is on: the View menu item, the command palette entry and the Ctrl + Shift + 4 shortcut only appear once you enable Settings → Advanced → Developer tools. Turn that on and open the Knowledge Base panel to see what your machine has and what is missing.

Requirements

The knowledge base, its relationship graph, search, live reload and Slidev preview all run on one local content server — a separate Node.js program that VMark starts on demand. Two things must be present before it can start:

• Node.js. VMark resolves node through your login shell's PATH, the way a terminal would, so a Node.js that only a project-local tool can see does not count. Install it so that node is on your login-shell PATH.
• The content server itself (server/content in the VMark repository, built to a cli.js). No packaged VMark build includes it yet — on any platform. This is not a Linux or Windows gap: the macOS DMG ships no content-server runtime either, and VMark's release checks assert that on every release. Until a release story lands, the feature requires a development setup — a checkout of VMark with the content server built, made available through the VMARK_CONTENT_SERVER_CLI environment variable (or a provisioned base-kb runtime in VMark's application data).

The panel checks both when it opens. When either is missing it says which one, and what would provide it, instead of attempting a start that cannot succeed.

Opening the panel

The Knowledge Base is hidden by default, because a release build cannot start it. To reveal it, turn on Settings → Advanced → Developer tools. The View → Knowledge Base menu item, the command palette entry ("Toggle Knowledge Base") and the Ctrl + Shift + 4 shortcut all appear with it, and all disappear again when you turn it off.

With Developer tools on, open the panel from View → Knowledge Base, the command palette, or Ctrl + Shift + 4. The panel docks on the right; toggle it again to hide it.

Turning Developer tools back off hides the entry points again, and closes the panel with them: the panel has no close button of its own, so leaving it open would strand a dock nothing could dismiss. A server that is already running is left alone — turn Developer tools back on to reach its Stop button, and VMark stops its content servers when it quits in any case.

Knowledge base

Open a workspace and start the Knowledge Base panel. VMark launches a local server bound to 127.0.0.1 (loopback only) and renders every markdown file as HTML using the same markdown semantics as the editor — wiki-links, alerts, math, tables, task lists, and details all render identically.

Capabilities:

• Wiki-link navigation — [[Page]], [[dir/Page]], [[Page#Heading]], and [[Page|Alias]] resolve across the workspace. Unresolved links render as "missing" so gaps are visible.
• Relationship graph — notes, tags (#tag and frontmatter tags:), and typed frontmatter relations (up, related, links, …) form an interactive graph with backlinks.
• Full-text search across the workspace.
• Live reload — saved edits refresh the served pages automatically.

You can view the knowledge base inside VMark (embedded panel) or open it in your browser — the "Open in browser" action performs a one-time authenticated handshake so your browser receives a session cookie. The server is loopback-only and cookie-gated; it never exposes your workspace beyond your machine.

Slidev presentations

When you open a markdown file whose frontmatter marks it as a Slidev deck (e.g. theme:, layout: + slides, or an explicit format: slidev), VMark can run the real Slidev toolchain to preview it live — the same renderer Slidev uses, so layouts, click animations, and components are fully faithful.

With the deck open and the Knowledge Base panel running, use Preview slides to open the live deck in your browser and Export slides to render it. Slidev watches the deck on disk, so saving edits in VMark hot-reloads the open preview.

Export

Slidev decks export to PDF, PNG, or PPTX. The content server runs Slidev's own slidev export command, which renders the slides in Chromium through the playwright-chromium package. VMark does not download or locate a browser for it: if playwright-chromium is not installed next to Slidev in the content server's runtime, the export fails and shows Slidev's error message. An export that runs longer than three minutes is stopped.

Privacy & security

• The server binds 127.0.0.1 only and requires a per-session token (delivered as an HttpOnly, SameSite=Strict cookie).
• File access is contained to the workspace root; path traversal is rejected and symlinks are not followed.
• Rendered HTML is sanitized and served under a content security policy. Workspace trust changes exactly one thing here: whether remote images render. VMark passes the workspace's trust to the server when it starts it; for a trusted workspace the policy relaxes img-src so https: images load, for an untrusted workspace only local and inline images render. Trust does not decide whether a workspace is served — any open workspace can be. Changing a workspace's trust while its knowledge base is running restarts the server, so the policy follows the change.