Unfortunately no. Thinking about it, it seems that I always use the color of the code to draw attention to the specific parts I am talking about (letting the rest fade out in a more neutral/low contrast color).
In some ways, I'd rather see the problem tackled the other way. PowerPoint is great for a lot of things, but it's not portable at all. It sucks to not be able to use things like useful animations because the conference is running PowerPoint 2007, and the only want to get live web content in there is with something like LiveSlides, which constrains to your own laptop. No wonder most people have a PDF fallback.
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I totally agree with you. I tried Rmd presentation many times but some topics/styles can be far more easily achieved by Keynote.
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This is one of the best and most honest examples/pieces of advice I can imagine of using the right tools for the task at hand. It's so easy to fall into the trap of identifying with a toolset ("R person" versus "python person" versus "Excel person") and then being too married to it. Thanks for putting things back into perspective 
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I also make all slides in Keynote, for talks, workshops, and teaching. When it's time to really focus on code, I switch over to RStudio and live-code or visit a rendered .Rmd and click "zoom in" a few times 
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I'm experimenting with a way to use reprex to create syntax highlighted RTF snippets that paste nicely into Keynote. But the current solution is very much "works on my macOS machine" (relies on a system call and assumes highlight is installed).
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It would be very neat to link R with an open source graphics design app such as svg-edit. A drawing pane would show a rough real-time and interactive preview of the output (its layout, at least), and we could manually move and resize objects, with smart guides, snap-to-grid, etc. Another pane, for code and content, would allow automatic generation of the content to go inside those placeholders (plots, code snippet, formatted text, ...). A presentation would have a global theme to define the default layout of slides, and each slide could overwrite it (title or blank page, text position, fonts, colours, one or two columns, etc.)
Linking the two panes to render the slides should be just a matter of defining names for the objects, and some glue code similar to what knitr+pandoc already do to format the content.
One could even imagine exporting the result to different formats such as latex or html.
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I currently use slidify with a franken-css that I cobbled together from my forays around GitHub issues and SO. Before this, I was all beamer, all the time, especially with the Metropolis theme. I might switch back since my gifs don't seem to be doing it for my students.
One of my frustrations with slidify is the challenge of creating handouts. In beamer, it is one additional line; I haven't figured out how to do it in R presentations.
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I came across slidify this week and i really want to use impress.js with slides. Is there any place i can learn how to do it. It seems like it has a lot of templates built in. Including reveal.js.
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I was wondering if anyone could suggest any available R packages that could solve the main issue discussed by @garrett here when creating presentations in R (i.e. via xarigan):
Why? Because you can’t beat a WYSIWYG editor for creating visual information like diagrams, animations, or (in a similar vein) art. For reasons based on psychology, I think that most slide decks should convey visual (i.e. non-textual) information. It is not easy to create visual information in a reproducible, programmable context (just think about dragging an image to the “right” location).
I recently came across the DiagrammeR package and thought that it may be a feasible tool to include diagrams in R-based presentations. Any other tools that may help in this way?
(RMarkdown + Xarigan + (some diagrams/animations tools) + some .CSS styling) > PowerPoint/keynote 
Thanks!
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