current-slide

Where is the user right now?

When the user says "fix this page", "tweak this heading", or "the slide I'm looking at", they almost never name the slide id, page number, or element — they mean wherever they are in the dev viewer. Before asking "which slide?" or "which element?", check the file the dev server writes on every navigation and inspector pick.

Re-read on every deictic turn — never reuse a prior read

current.json is a live cursor, not a fact about the conversation. The user moves between slides, pages, and elements freely between your turns — including while you were doing other work. Read the file fresh at the start of every new turn that uses a deictic reference, even if:

• you already read it earlier in this same conversation,
• you just finished editing the slide it pointed to,
• the user's new message sounds like a continuation ("now make it bigger", "also fix this one", "keep going").

A "continue editing" follow-up is exactly the case where the user has likely just navigated to a different slide or picked a different element. Trusting your last read here will silently edit the wrong file. Re-read, compare slideId / pageIndex / selection against what you used last time, and act on the new values.

How to read it

node_modules/.open-slide/current.json

Path is relative to the project root (the user's cwd, the directory that contains slides/ and package.json). Use the Read tool. The file is JSON.

What you get

{
  "slideId": "q2-roadmap",
  "pageIndex": 2,
  "pageNumber": 3,
  "totalPages": 8,
  "slideTitle": "Q2 Roadmap",
  "view": "slides",
  "pagePath": "slides/q2-roadmap/index.tsx",
  "selection": {
    "line": 42,
    "column": 6,
    "tagName": "h1",
    "text": "Q2 Roadmap"
  },
  "updatedAt": "2026-05-09T14:32:11.123Z"
}

• slideId — folder name under slides/. Use as-is for any /__slides/<id>/... API or as the URL segment.
• pageIndex — 0-based, for use with the page array in index.tsx (export default [Cover, Body, ...]).
• pageNumber — 1-based, for use in messages to the user ("page 3 of 8") and for the URL ?p=N.
• pagePath — relative path to the slide source. Hand straight to Read / Edit.
• view — "slides" (canvas view) or "assets" (asset manager). If "assets", the user is browsing files for that slide rather than viewing a page.
• selection — null if nothing is selected. Otherwise, the JSX element the user picked in the inspector overlay:
  • line (1-indexed) and column (0-indexed) point to the JSX opening tag inside pagePath. This is the canonical handle — match against the source line, not the rendered DOM.
  • tagName is the rendered DOM tag, lowercased ("h1", "div", "img").
  • text is a trimmed text snippet (≤120 chars) from the element's textContent, useful as a sanity check that you're looking at the right node.
  • Selection auto-clears whenever the user navigates to a different slide or page.
• updatedAt — ISO timestamp of the last navigation or selection change. Use it to detect staleness.