GoKawiilSeptember 06 2026, Monday
Magic Move for Code Snippets from first principles
Introduction
I have been using a Framework 16 as my daily driver ever since its launch. For a long time, I maintained a fragile truce dual-booting Ubuntu and Windows. But in late 2025, I finally pulled the plug, wiped both, and went all-in on CachyOS. Why I switched is probably worth a dedicated blog post, but the short version: I couldn't be happier. Arch / CachyOS has been an absolute breath of fresh air.
At work, my daily driver is an M5 MacBook. Lately, macOS has felt increasingly frustrating to live with. How Apple managed to trade away desktop performance in favor of Liquid Glass eye candy is a compromise I will never quite understand.
Moving to Linux full-time was surprisingly painless. Most tools I rely on had native Linux builds, and for the few that didn't, solid alternatives stepped in. But there was one painful sacrifice that gave me pause: Apple Keynote (and, more specifically, Magic Move).
As someone who speaks at conferences fairly often, presentation tooling isn't vanity - it's narrative scaffolding. For years, I had the luxury of leaning on Keynote to make complex technical concepts look effortless. Walking away from that workflow stung.
Magic Move, and Its Shortcomings
Yet for all its brilliance, Magic Move has always had a glaring blind spot: animating code snippets.
If you've ever tried to transition between two snippets of code in Keynote, you know the horror. Keynote doesn't understand code; it understands glyphs. Watch in dismay as the val from line 1 flies diagonally across the slide to morph into the al of calculate() , while punctuation scrambles like alphabet soup.
... continue reading