// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Magic Move for Code Snippets from first principles
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.
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.
To make it look professional, you're forced into brittle, unhinged workarounds: splitting lines into invisible bounding boxes, inserting transparent dummy characters, and pixel-nudging tokens by hand just to show a clean three-line refactor. You can make it look magical, but only through sheer brute force. Still, the payoff was real: after almost every conference talk, people would come up not to ask about the architecture, but to ask: "How on earth did you do those cool animations?"
Working on the Jetpack Compose team, a UI toolkit that is now fully multiplatform - this comes up constantly. In fact, it's practically an annual tradition: every Google I/O or major conference season, someone on the team inevitably stares at a mangled transition and declares: "What if we just wrote our entire slide deck in Compose so code animates properly?"
A few brave souls have actually done it using Compose's Shared Element transitions. I wasn't quite brave enough to abandon WYSIWYG tooling entirely - Keynote is still unmatched for layout, typography, and the parts of your presentation that are not code (even if Apple is slowly gatekeeping more templates behind a subscription).
A couple of weeks ago on HN, there was a project called Bento that really caught my attention. This is a fully local, offline and an extensible presentation toolkit. The project is very slick, and definitely worth paying attention to. Bento supports morph already for shapes and mathematical expressions. You can tween position, colors & even gradients. The only feature missing from my perspective was to be able to support morphing code snippets.