Bento — the office suite that fits in a file

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: • One file, forever. Deck, fonts, images, charts, animations, and the full editor travel together. A copy from 2026 will open in 2036. • View-source honest. Your data sits in a plain, readable JSON block at the top of the file. No binary formats, no lock-in, no archaeology. • It saves itself. The file rewrites its own data block on save (File System Access API, with a download fallback). No app to install, ever. • Local-first, provably. Flip on Offline mode and nothing leaves your machine — updates and nothing leaves your machine — updates and then save the same file back so. 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. 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: • File harnesses edit the #bento-doc JSON in place: Claude Code, Cursor, Aider, or any agent with filesystem access. Claude Code users get a packaged bento-slides skill (installable from this repo's plugin marketplace: /plugin marketplace add nybinet/bento) that even downloads the latest Bento app by itself. • Chat round-trip: copy the document JSON out (About → Copy document JSON), let the assistant rewrite it, paste it back. It works fully offline with local, open-weight models — point Ollama, 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 the deep dive: docs/architecture.md. Security model, honestly • Collab keys are minted client-side at document creation and live only in the file. Possession of the file = membership; "Rotate keys" = revocation. • The relay sees: ciphertext, connection timing, and a hash of the room key. It cannot read content, names, or structure. • Presence names are claims, not proofs — fine within a shared-key room; enterprise identity would need signed frames (designed, not built). • Update checks fetch a static manifest and send nothing about you or your document. Signature + hash + version monotonicity checks are verified in-app. • Known trade-offs: undo during live collab is snapshot-based and can revert a collaborator's Bento is a PowerPoint alternative where the presentation and its editor live inside one HTML file. Open it in a browser, change the deck, then save the same file back, with no account or installer. Slides can carry fonts, images, charts, and animations, while the document data stays readable JSON. It even supports encrypted collaboration through an optional blind relay. That’s a refreshingly portable way to own a presentation. #github #opensource