
How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim - tambourine_man
https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-1/
======
kinkrtyavimoodh
As a feat in itself this is definitely very impressive, but I wonder if it's
really worth anyone's time to spend precious lecture time with your mind fully
occupied in the mechanical task of taking notes rather than actually absorbing
and engaging with the content. Especially for an extremely content-dense
subject like Mathematics, where you need all your concentration just to
process what you are reading and follow along the logic.

There is absolutely no dearth of study material on the internet. It's one
thing to take notes as part of your study process. There it helps solidify
your understanding. But surely taking notes on the fly when you have been
barely introduced to the subject isn't going to help with that.

~~~
txcwpalpha
> mechanical task of taking notes rather than actually absorbing and engaging
> with the content

The mechanical task of taking notes is one of the most important parts of
actually absorbing the material. It is not an either-or. Hearing/seeing the
information, processing it in a way that makes sense to you individually, and
then mechanically writing it down in a legible manner is one of the main
methods that your brain learns. It's one of the primary reasons that taking
notes is important in the first place. This is referred to as the "encoding
hypothesis" [1].

There are actually even studies [2] that show that tools that assist in more
efficient note taking, such as taking notes via typing rather than by hand,
are actually detrimental to absorbing information, as it makes it easier for
you to effectively pass the information directly from your ears to your
computer without actually doing the processing that is required when writing
notes by hand. This is why many universities prefer (or even require) notes to
be taken by hand, and disallow laptops in class.

1:
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0361476X78...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0361476X78900206)

2: [https://www.npr.org/2016/04/17/474525392/attention-
students-...](https://www.npr.org/2016/04/17/474525392/attention-students-put-
your-laptops-away)

~~~
function_seven
Not that it detracts from your point, but I definitely benefited from
notetaking on my computer in school. For an AP History class, I typed up—in
outline style (I, II; A, B; 1, 2; a, b; etc)—all my notes on the required
reading. At the end of the course, I had a few hundred pages of these notes
all printed up.

I never had to go back and read any of them. Just the process of typing them
up in the first place firmly fixed all the knowledge in my mind. When taking
the final and AP test, I could see the notes I had taken in my mind.

Writing or typing didn’t make a difference. Just the rephrasing and condensing
alone was enough. (Which, again, reënforces your point. I still had to
consciously avoid “pass-thru” regurgitation)

~~~
pjc50
> reënforces

What's it like working at the New Yorker?

(explanation: this is a joke based on the way nobody uses diaresis marks
anymore for any word other than naive, except for the New Yorker style guide.
[https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-
of-...](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-the-
diaeresis) )

~~~
ninkendo
Not only that but the common spelling is "reinforces", which doesn't need a
diaeresis at all. It's like function_seven went very far out of the way to
show that they know what a diaeresis is...

~~~
function_seven
I’m not usually pretentious, but when it comes to the double-e, I lean in :)

------
setquk
I don't agree with this. Perhaps it's possible for someone with exceptional
LaTeX and vim knowledge, but even after using both for 20 years I wouldn't do
this.

The point of the lecture is to assimilate structure and basic understanding,
not to produce a neat set of notes instantly. To take notes to this detail
means you're putting more time into the note taking than the work.

Use a pen and paper. Write down structure as it happens. Write down things you
understand, short hand. Write down things you don't for later review. After 2
hour long linear circuits lectures I regularly waltzed off with a couple of
pages of loose A4 for review. A lot of the time, our lecturers would give us a
copy of the OHP stack if we asked them as well.

Write your notes up at the end of the day with reference material at hand and
no compromises. You can structure, extrapolate and transform things into your
own understandable language then.

~~~
ordu
People are different, the processes in their minds goes different ways. People
develops different styles of learning and then they adopt to that styles and
adopt styles for themselves. So it is pointless to agree or disagree.

I personally like this idea of vim+LaTeX. It is close to what I did while
studying math, though I write notes down with pen and paper. Mostly I wrote
down them once and read them once before exam. I remember some issues with
this approach, but the one I remember most was due to incomplete recording,
not due to "I didn't managed to understand this mess of greek letters while
listening a lecture".

I remember some problems due to inability to understand, it was Galua theory,
but I solved them by reading books. I had read three different authors on
topic, and I think it was the only way, I think that any style of keeping
records would not help more then mine.

And I hate to write greek letters by hand. There is one names xi, I never
managed to figure out how to write it, so xi looked in my recordings as some
messy knot of lines. All my xi's was different, but there was a bright side of
this: xi was the only one, that was so messy, so I could understand that it is
xi when I saw this mess. With LaTex xi looks nice and clear.

~~~
wholinator2
On the point of writing greek letters and symbols I've taken to practicing a
Greek letter possibly hundreds of times when I first encounter it. Just write
it, write it, and write it again.

At first it's just to understand how my hand has to move to write it
efficiently, then I move on to attempting to write precisely. Finally, I write
it over and over pushing myself to get it to the speed at which it will not
interrupt the rest of the notes when it happens. This approach has be wildly
successful for me and while it does take some time it is always time well
spent.

Recently, I ran into § and just had to figure it out. Honestly, I was out of
my depth in the Wikipedia article and I don't even know what it represents. It
was fun, though.

~~~
coliveira
> I ran into §

This is the symbol for section, it means that a new section is starting, or it
may be a reference to a section number.

------
dangom
1700 pages of notes would translate to 9 pages/working-day in a year. That's a
lot of note taking. The blog post is wonderful and does show outstanding LaTeX
and VIM practical knowledge, but I'd be skeptical that the average student
could absorb so much content and still have time to bring it to such a
polished final format every day.

Nonetheless, there's definitely a lesson to be learned here with respect to
the usage of templates. In essence it seems like OP developed his own
shorthand language for both text and mathematics. I'm always curious to hear
about approaches that try to solve the bandwidth problem (as we have
quickscript [1] for hand-writing and stenography [2] for typing). Most
interestingly, I'd be curious to know whether these short-hand notations are
actually capable of improving learning and assimilation, and whether they'd
work for a general audience.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quikscript](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quikscript)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography)

~~~
akrout
Looks like you have a typo in your [2] link. I think you meant to link to
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenotype](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenotype)

~~~
dangom
That is correct, thank you. Also in the description, I meant stenotype and not
stenography.

------
hliyan
> which makes for a total of more than 1700 pages of notes

That's an absolutely incredible feat, especially considering that the notes
look pretty much textbook-quality!

Although personally, I have never been able to both absorb a lecture _and_
take electronic notes. If I need comprehension, my notes have always had to be
pen-and-paper.

Once again, this is an incredible feat.

~~~
_emacsomancer_
> If I need comprehension, my notes have always had to be pen-and-paper.

I agree. However, if I want to be able to refer to them afterwards, I really
need to take electronic notes.

~~~
randomsearch
Agreed. So we have this problem that can only be resolved by taking notes with
a pen before typing them up. This has the nice opportunity of reviewing them
whilst typing, and puts pressure on you to ensure understanding when making
notes.

~~~
jjeaff
Or use one of the many handwriting recognition apps and take pictures of the
hand notes. You don't actually want to convert the handwriting to text,
because there will be errors. But it should be good enough to create a search
index.

------
miki123211
I use LaTeX for notetaking as a blind person because that's the only way to
show my notes to sighted people. Nothing else comes even close. Ascimath would
be much better and that's what I'd recommend for most people, unless you're
required to send PDF documents and often offline.

~~~
trombonechamp
Thanks for the ascimath reference. Do you know of any similar technologies for
writing equations in a simpler and more readable form than latex?

I've never seen ascimath before but I wish I had because I think I partially
reinvented the wheel. I wrote some extensions to Pandoc (and an associated
emacs major-mode) for scientific note-taking, with a main portion being a
"simplified latex" for writing equations in a more readable way. The key
features of simplified latex format are matlab-style matrices, UTF8 support,
easy exponents, and better formatting (e.g. functions automatically use roman
instead of italics). There are still a few edge cases mine doesn't catch, but
I'm in the process of rewriting it in Haskell and rewrite is more stable.

[https://code.launchpad.net/~mwshinn/+junk/notes3](https://code.launchpad.net/~mwshinn/+junk/notes3)

or for documentation:

[https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~mwshinn/+junk/notes3/view/head...](https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~mwshinn/+junk/notes3/view/head:/notes3.n)

~~~
cben
eqn (part of troff) from 1974, predating TeX, had a very decent syntax! It's
not as complete as TeX, and the layout quality is worse, and I wouldn't want
to touch the rest of troff syntax. So not really practical, but good
inspiration.

Open/LibreOffice math formulas use a syntax that's clearly inspired by it.
Unfortunately it's very lacking in documentation.

Another important question is are you looking for presentational or semantic
math? For presentational fine tuning I'm afraid nothing can beat the
flexibility of TeX _combined with a huge body of Q &A_ (on stack exchange and
elsewhere)...

------
war1025
I always found that my notes were effectively write-only.

The process of writing things down on paper helped me absorb the information,
but beyond that I never really looked back at the notes.

Generally I could find the information I needed in a better form somewhere
else. If anything, the notes mainly helped me review broadly which topics were
covered on which days.

For math specifically, I always found that what helped me most was to come up
with a general "shape" of how I used the paper when solving a problem of a
particular type. Then I would end up with a visual that helped me know which
bits of information I was missing and what I needed to do where to find the
answer.

It's different from the "draw a picture" thing, really more of a knolling[1]
of the problem down on paper. If all the things are in their places, then the
answer to the problem is straight-forward to come up with.

Edit:

Mise en place [2] might also be a good way to describe it.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Sachs_(artist)#Knolling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Sachs_\(artist\)#Knolling)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mise_en_place](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mise_en_place)

------
z3t4
This reminds me of the sole draining * job as a "web developer" to turn word
documents into HTML. I imagine such a job also exist in science, but instead
of Word to HTML you turn paper notes into LaTeX. He could probably make good
money helping professors write papers.

* You coded since you where 15 years old, wrote your own game engine, wanted to cure cancer and save the world, and now your job is to copy text from one document to another.

~~~
krageon
The best response to having to do dumb work like this is to automate it with
regex, bash (and possibly an unzipping tool - aren't word documents zipped
xml?) and take the time that people previously gave you to do the task to
tweak your scripts and learn things you find interesting. I got through my
dumbest student jobs that way, which was almost all of my student jobs.

~~~
z3t4
I got a friend that basically automated his job, the management was not
pleased, and forced him to go back to doing it manually ...

He managed to get another job. But figured out he wanted to work with actual
software development, and it also seems to be a shortage of software
developers. But it was virtually impossible to get a job without a degree or
experience. So he's now at age 45 enrolling a five year university program to
become an engineer on paper ...

~~~
creatornator
This is so unfortunate, but I'm not surprised. What kind of poor management,
when met with an efficiency that could double an employee's output by
automating their current job, limits it back to the 50% efficiency? I've met
some managers like that...

------
elagost
This method is beautiful and incredibly complicated. Anyone who has enough
determination to build up their tools like this and make them 100% ideal and
customized for their situation deserves all the praise they get.

If your use case is similar to the author's, perhaps consider taking your
environment and leaning hard into customization. As he's proven, it's very
much worth it. Seems like it would be much less useful to copy his configs
rather than building your own organic system after years of use, though -
which is what he did.

I really like vim, personally, but I encourage my coworkers more familiar with
Windows to use nano over vi (nobody wants to type that extra m, for some
reason) because they're less likely to mess things up. Better off for them to
learn their own way rather than being dumped in the middle of the vi desert
with no way to exit.

~~~
angleofrepose
> Seems like it would be much less useful to copy his configs rather than
> building your own organic system after years of use, though - which is what
> he did.

This is a great point and one I've been thinking about more recently. Tools
and/or setups like the one displayed in the post with this level of
specificity or complexity seem like they would be almost useless packaged up
as a standalone. Much more valuable would be the system on which this was
built (vim and the collections of extensions he used, not saying this is
anywhere near an idea workflow but as you know if you use vim - it is
extensible in its own right). Or, rather than that system, to take inspiration
in it and design tools with much more intentional flexibility to allow people
to build their experience.

I recently had a great conversation about how science educators might wish to
have 3 brown 1 blue style animations or experiments, but such a programming
tool would be much too difficult to teach to the educators. I think that is
totally true, 3b1b generates his videos programmatically and while I believe
some version of his tool is open source, he does not offer any support. But
there is something to the idea of having one's own publishing tool and
workflow to allow the exploration of ideas in whatever field it may be. For
Science teachers, they ought to be able to play in a tool like 3b1b uses, but
it can't be his exact one, it seems they'd need some well thought out
foundation upon which to express their mental models of physics or geometry or
whatever it is.

3b1b about page; first item is his modeling approach:
[https://www.3blue1brown.com/faq](https://www.3blue1brown.com/faq)

3b1b animation: [https://github.com/3b1b/manim](https://github.com/3b1b/manim)

------
EdwardCoffin
I got a STEM degree in the early 1990s, and my usual note taking style was in
the same vein: I used four colours of pen, a straightedge for lines, and tried
to make nicely presentable notes that I would not have to make alterations to
after the lecture.

In retrospect I think this was completely insane. I was so preoccupied with
the mundane details of layout and presentation that many of the important
technical details the professors were talking about went right by me. I'm
amazed I managed to get by with this style.

One of the courses I did best in was one for which the blackboard presentation
was drawn from the textbook, and in that one I did not bother with the
elaborate note taking, just relied on the textbook. For some reason I never
made the connection between me doing unusually well in that course and the
fact that I wasn't distracted by note taking.

If I were to do it all over again I would make my notes merely capture the
information (and if I knew the information was in my text, just capture enough
to identify where), and if I really wanted beautifully laid out notes I would
rewrite them after class, with the added benefit that the rewriting would be
an implicit review.

------
erk__
I now use org-mode to do my notes it pretty much removes the need to write non
math latex and when you have to write math you just inline the latex. And
because I also write my assignments in the same file I can generate a nice
latex file with everything I have written doing the course.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Org-mode is awesome, but the points about snippets still apply. AFAIR
yasnippet should support most, if not all, capabilities presented in this
article.

------
bluenose69
As a 30-year latex user and a 10-year newbie to vim, I am impressed by the
author's skills, and will likely copy some of his macros. However, as someone
who has taught mathematically-inclined material for those three decades, I
cannot recommend using a computer to take notes in class, for I have simply
never seen a student who found that effective.

Although some students try to take notes on a computer during the first day of
my classes, I have never seen one who tried to do that after the second or
third lecture. The paper method (or, equivalently, using a stylus to hand-
write on a screen) is simply better suited to the dynamic of a class. An
effective class is not a linear presentation of material, a sort of recitation
of a book by a professor. And effective notes are not transcriptions of the
class material. An effective class weaves around through a topic, building on
interactions with the students. This often involves departures from a simple
path that, transcribed in real-time, would be footnotes within footnotes
within footnotes, "Inception" style. And of course mathematical material tends
to involve a lot of diagrams. Hand-written notes, with lots of arrows between
ideas and boxes with sketches, are not just a good way of making a record of a
class, but they are a great way of understanding what's going on in real time.

The only place I could see this detailed note-taking method working would be
in a class where the teacher essentially reproduced a book in class. But is
that the kind of class that justifies the cost of tuition?

I have two anecdotes I'd like to share.

1\. A student came to me to ask a question about something that came up in
class. I asked to see her notes, to get a clearer idea of what was confusing
her. The notes were amazingly insightful and clear. I asked how she took those
notes, which contained some things I had said and others I had not said. She
replied "I don't write down what you say, I write down what I think you mean."
This student will likely be a professor in a few years, and I envy the
students who will take her classes.

2\. Last term, I recommended that my students try the Cornell note-taking
method. (See
[http://lsc.cornell.edu/notes.html](http://lsc.cornell.edu/notes.html) for an
example, although there are many treatments of the method online, including
videos.) The students who tried it seemed to enjoy it, and it may be no
accident that the class leader was one of them.

------
ska
An alternate approach: Somewhere in the middle of my first math degree I
basically stopped taking notes in lectures (maybe 1/2 page, or a few lines per
lecture, just any "aha" moment, really). Best change I ever made.

This way I could focus on the lecture itself - and as you can't learn this
stuff without doing it my "real" notes were made later while doing exercises.

------
ygra
Interestingly he uses pretty much the same techniques that I relied on when
typing lecture notes with Word:

\- Formula auto-buildup with automatic replacements of \stuff with Unicode
keeps the mess of backslashes and braces more readable (and it also allowed me
to immediately spot where I mistyped something)

\- I used snippet-like things for parts I had to type a few times, such as a
formula that's revisited a handful of times alter.

\- Some things are simply easier to type in Word (with UnicodeMath) than
LaTeX, such as a^12 being automatically what a^{12} is in LaTeX or fractions
being written as a/b, thus requiring fewer braces. Also, as a user of a non-US
keyboard layout back then, UnicodeMath's use of () instead of {} for invisible
grouping and automatically resizing parentheses meant a lot less typing in
general and less syntax to inadvertently break the layout.

The only thing I could not do in real-time was figures where I often did a
quick sketch on paper and in the evening converted that into a nice drawing.
But text and math was (at least for me) easily writable in real-time and
generally required no post-processing or prettification. Assigning certain
styles to keyboard shortcuts was also something the author probably used
snippets for, but the end result for the typing experience is pretty much the
same.

I did write notes by hand the preceding year, averaging about 7 pages of notes
per lecture. Others have mentioned it too, the very act of writing notes helps
remembering. For the handwritten notes I could just as well have bought the
book by the professor, but I didn't do that on purpose. For me, there was no
difference in being able to remember my notes between handwriting and typing.
And generally I did spend most of the lecture writing and understanding came
later when solving the assignments.

~~~
mklingen
This is how I took notes in college as well. TeX people may scoff but word is
way better for taking math notes quickly. Just learn the key combos and you
can do almost anything rapidly. The only thing I found tedious was
matrix/vector stuff.

------
jclay
I used to do this, but I switched to just using a Jupyter Notebook. It’s nice
to be able to move between multiple computers, with no need to set up a LaTeX
install.

A couple of things I love about this setup:

I can write in Markdown and drop to LaTeX when I need to forumalate any
equations.

For homework, I can implement a quick Python script inline to build intuition
behind a topic.

I can use Sympy to simplify and solve for more complex derivations. This
outputs LaTeX which I can paste into the requisite Markdown cell.

With Plotly, I can quickly create a nice 2D or 3D visualization.

~~~
Cybiote
Hi, what sort of complex derivations can you solve for with Sympy?

~~~
mkl
Tons of different things:
[https://www.sympy.org/en/features.html](https://www.sympy.org/en/features.html).
Try it for yourself: [https://live.sympy.org/](https://live.sympy.org/)

E.g. find critical points on a surface:

    
    
      e = (x-y+2)*(x**2+y**2-9)
      solve([e.diff(x), e.diff(y)], [x, y])
    

Note that this online demo runs at a restricted speed; locally (e.g. install
Anaconda and use Jupyter Notebook or QtConsole) it's much faster.

------
steventhedev
Impressive! For anyone looking to do something similar, but in Sublime, I can
recommend the LatexTools[0] plugin, which gives similar live previews of math
mode. I'd never considered embedding figures from Inkscape though.

I also decided that I wanted to keep lecture notes in LaTeX, and the best
advice I have for anyone is to just practice. Start from LyX if it helps, but
just make sure that you grind down the rough edges. It takes a long time, but
like many skills that are worth learning, it takes lots of effort but the
payoff is worth it.

[0]:
[https://github.com/SublimeText/LaTeXTools](https://github.com/SublimeText/LaTeXTools)

~~~
quietbritishjim
_Start from LyX if it helps, but just make sure that you grind down the rough
edges._

Fully enough, I would have exactly the opposite recommendation: Start by
writing LaTeX out manually, then move on to LyX when you have a good
understanding.

This is due to a combination of (1) needing to already know about LaTeX
features before you can know to look for them in LyX (buried in menus or
whatever) and (2) although LaTeX errors are much rarer when you're using LyX,
when you do get them they're often really confusing ones. I'd say that using
LyX requires greater knowledge of LaTeX than using LaTeX directly, just
applied less often.

The benefit of LyX is not that you avoid needing to know about LaTeX. It's
that you don't have to see it when you're editing your content. Equations with
a lot of subscripts and superscripts come to mind; anyone who claims that it
is easier to find and fix mistakes in a nested superscript in the raw LaTeX
rather than just clicking directly in rendered representation and fixing it in
place is, frankly, lying, if only to themselves.

------
sus_007
I'm surprised to see not enough mentions of Emacs's Orgmode which clearly
dominates Vim when it comes to note-taking with or without Latex. Not to start
another Vim vs Emacs war, I've been using both of them for quite some years
now for each of their specialties. But when it comes to Notetaking, Orgmode is
hands-down far superior with it's rich plugin ecosystem & minor modes within.
Some plugins I use to do Latexy stuffs on Emacs is (ofc) Auctex, latex-
preview-pane, PDFTools. Finally, OxHugo to export my Latexy org as a blog post
to my Hugo blog.

~~~
ShepherdKing
See [https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode](https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode)
for Orgmode in Vim.

------
nso95
1700 pages? You've just rewritten the textbook. That doesn't seem like a good
use of time.

------
redbumble
Hey, for note taking using markdown and mathjax, I also like Typora
([https://typora.io](https://typora.io)) a lot.

Easy to install, wysiwym, works out-of-the-box!

~~~
mathblocks
I do the same thing (markdown and mathjax) but I use TeXMe
([https://github.com/susam/texme](https://github.com/susam/texme)). I like
TeXMe a lot because it turns any Markdown and LaTeX notes into a self-
rendering file. Just open your Markdown+LaTeX notes in any browser and it
renders itself beautifully, almost looks like a paper.

It is not wysiwyg though. But for me the convenience of distributing my
Markdown+LaTeX source itself that can render in any browser without a separate
compilation/processing step is a huge win!

See [https://github.com/susam/texme#get-
started](https://github.com/susam/texme#get-started) if you are curious how it
works.

------
twiceaday
I did the same thing when I was in uni. Couple of my profs asked for my notes
so they can make class notes for next year. I also did all of my math
assignments this way and it was so easy copying stuff from the notes and
working with it without erasing and compromising on space. I could break down
every algebraic step for maximum clarity.

------
andbberger
I did this during college (but with emacs).

It was fine. I was in the habit of TeXing up my homework anyway so was fairly
practiced, and I have shit handwriting and know I'll never reference anything
I write on paper, or have it to look at in a few years. I also don't get that
much out of lectures.

YMMV

It's nice to have it to reference now though.

------
billfruit
Why don't universities just videotape the lectures as they are happening and
make them available for reference to the students. Then the students can just
pay full attention to listening the lecture while it is happening, then the
students can use the tapes later to make notes later if required.

------
decasteve
I took notes using emacs and LaTeX in similar fashion. But I started by doing
all of my assignments with it until I became proficient enough. I can type
much faster than I write. I didn’t use any Elisp to help — though I probably
should have in retrospect. I did have some common LaTeX macros/commands. It
was nice to have the notes to study from in the end.

This helped most in doing assignments and is what I’d recommend to others. I
would write by pencil and paper then type as LaTeX. This forced me to review
my solutions and fix mistakes or improve them.

I didn’t attempt to get too fancy with plots in real-time (I kept a notebook
for those courses) but I did do graph theory and commutative diagrams
(category theory) with tikz.

------
debbiedowner
I used to do this too, but I took pics of the figures or drew on paper them
instead. The only times you don't feel like the silliest student in the room
when live texing is when you have one of those professors that edits each
equation in place for 5 mins and quickly instead of rewriting the equations in
edited form.

There are some lectures where every week something truly unique happens that
is not available in any one book in the whole world, AND you have to know it
well for your area or bc of a hard test.

But in all other cases, where the information can be found in some textbook or
it is some well studied subject, my opinion is it's not worth it. Texing can
turn into an escape from actually learning the stuff

------
kacamak
Why would you torture yourself like this? In mathematics understanding is
everything, and using the time to listen carefully and understand is more
important than having perfect notes, handwritten notes are quite enough.

------
enriquto
Beautiful tricks for writing efficiently in LaTeX. But I just hate to take
notes during lectures. I prefer if the professor gives the printed notes and
then you need just to add small annotations, if anything.

------
blastbeat
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19440652](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19440652)

------
aportnoy
Dropping a bombshell:
[https://github.com/brennier/quicktex](https://github.com/brennier/quicktex)

------
wy35
While this is certainly impressive, writing math formulas by hand commits them
to memory way more effectively than typing latex commands/snippets. Although,
an argument could be made that writing formulas in lecture is negligible
compared to the amount of practice required outside of lecture for any
mathematics course.

------
Vaslo
When I see a Math lecture written in LaTeX, I immediately know that I will
probably be too dumb to follow it. It's almost always a deep exposition on
what the writer want to show he/she knows or how many complicated formulas
they can apply rather than really try to teach me something.

~~~
dangom
Not necessarily true. If you take the score of e.g. Chopin's Ballade N.3 you'd
be inclined to think sheet music is all just show off. Abstract notation takes
time to parse and understand when you see it for the first time, no matter how
well versed you are.

------
jxy
A template expander is indispensable for productivity. I have a perl script
that expands text based on matching regular expressions. In this way I'm not
tied to any particular editors: I wrap it in an AppleScript for a text
service, and I wrap it in a shell script for working in Acme.

~~~
mhd
Of course that doesn't get you niceties like jumping to different parts of the
template and mirroring edits. But having it universally available might be
worth the trade-offs. How do you invoke it in Acme? Tag item mouse-click for
every expansion?

~~~
jxy
Just option click the script name. The script look at the current window body,
RE match dot or RE match texts right before the dot. The first match executes
the associated action. It's basically an extended version of plumber.

------
markkm
Good ol' Live-TeXing. Googling "LiveTeXing" will show you other examples of
this, if you are curious to see more.

For those who aren't already familiar with Vim, Kile 3.0 beta is a fine
substitute. It does most of what's described in the post in a GUI environment.

------
yubiox
I really like this, but it would be very hard to learn all the macros. There
were no real portable computers when I did undergrad. When I much later went
to law school I transcribed about 90% of what the professors said on a latptop
and then later went back though it to make outlines and then outlines of
outlines. I took some premed classes after that but because of the drawings I
had to handwrite the notes. I still transcribed as much as possible of what
the professors said and later went back and outlined from it. I've never been
able to learn from the textbook and if I ever missed a class I did poorly if
tested on that material.

------
emgee_1
Very impressive. The first displayed text page contains a typo at the bottom :
CHAUCHY iso CAUCHY. As others have said physically rewriting is part of
comprehension (as is rewriting new words learned in a new language) As the
lecture notes are drafts from the black board I suggest using a font that does
not make it look like perfectly printed. You can fool yourself believing what
you wrote because it looks so pretty.

If you are writing a considerable amount of latex his setup is really cool. I
will you these ideas but using emacs in stead of vim. Wonderful job!!

------
chicob
This is really neat. But for me, if typing on a keyboard becomes just as
functional as writing, I would still choose paper and pencil for two reasons:
no power is required and it effortlessly autosaves.

------
aboutruby
That's interesting, I don't use vim snippets but seems like there is a few of
them (mainly snipMate/UltiSnips)

[https://vi.stackexchange.com/questions/7466/what-is-the-
diff...](https://vi.stackexchange.com/questions/7466/what-is-the-difference-
between-the-vim-snippets-plugins)

And there is a community-maintained repository of snippets:
[https://github.com/honza/vim-snippets](https://github.com/honza/vim-snippets)

------
semitext
Neat. I'm a self-taught developer, and I learned a lot by watching MIT
computer science lectures on youtube while taking notes in a markdown file.
But I definitely hit a wall when I tried to follow the Mathematics for
Computer Science course. I didn't have a good way to handle the notation.
Ultimately though I think if I ever decide to follow through with that I'll
probably just write in a notebook and scan the documents so I can easily
reference them. But I love the dedication to figuring this out!

------
arminiusreturns
Hi. From: Emacs org-mode users who export to latex/pdf.

------
ascar
Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 (the tab) had a feature in cooperation with
WolframAlpha a few years back that translated your handwritten formula into a
nice digital formula. It was like 90% there. Unfortunately fixing
interpretation errors was a pain in the ass, which made it basically useless.

I wonder if there was any meaningful improvement on this approach. Even just
adding a nice UI to fix errors would've made it really useful.

------
zwaps
Something different, but I use this

[https://remarkable.com/](https://remarkable.com/)

Think of a big Kindle, good battery, and really good writing experience (much
like paper). I can note on pdfs, it has handwriting recognition, exports well
and is otherwise a joy to use. I used to have a top of the line Samsung tablet
before, and was never really happy with it for taking notes and reading.

~~~
twoquestions
How does this compare to taking notes on a Surface or iPad, color aside?

It looks really cool, but pricey for what it can do.

------
ShepherdKing
The real value I see here, is being able to write anything, such as a
publication-quality scientific document - in Vim. I have yet to see a
comprehensive overview of what this would entail in Vim. I think Orgmode [1]
in Vim makes progress towards this.

[1] [https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode](https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode)

------
DantesKite
That's quite remarkable that you were able to do so many things so effortless
in real-time.

And all the notes look so beautiful.

------
_emacsomancer_
Very cool & beautiful notes!

I'm looking forward to seeing how the author live-TeX's figures - I'd love to
get better at creating figures in TeX even in a slower, more offline context.

Having to drop to Python in some cases seems non-ideal though. If only there
were some editor with good, customisable scripting built-in.....

------
jimhefferon
I want to ask about the converse of this article. I teach at a college. I make
presentations using LaTeX. I like to imagine that one advantage is that
students can suck them off the intranet and work from them.

I want to ask if this is common. Do students not find that other people do it?

------
Adamantcheese
So what I see here is a very impressive, hand built tab completion system for
a specific task. Makes lots of things much faster. Now all you need to do is
speed it up some more by using less keystrokes and a stenotype machine.

But really the takeaway is the auto-completion. Incredibly useful.

------
xurukefi
Didn't believe that this is really possible. Certainly interesting to see what
is possible with macros and workflow optimizations. However, why is this
extensive note taking necessary? Shouldn't the course materials provide a
digital copy of the script?

------
choeger
Nice setup. Good explanation and seemingly gets the job done.

Just one grievance: if you are concerned with parsing your latex (even if
that's only possible while you restrict yourself), you should use the
parentheses as math delimiters: `\\( x + z\\)`

------
yaseer
This is impressive.

There is no way I would be able to take these notes, live, and learn the
mathematics simultaneously. So this approach wouldn't be a good idea for me,
and perhaps most people.

But if you're able to do that, then it's doubly impressive.

------
zadwang
The techniques in the article definitely are useful to improve efficiency of
typing math. I have used vi/vim and latex for many years (over 20). And this
still impressed me a lot. Can’t wait to see how he does the figures.

~~~
curiousgal
He's using inkscape.

[https://www.quora.com/Can-people-actually-keep-up-with-
note-...](https://www.quora.com/Can-people-actually-keep-up-with-note-taking-
in-Mathematics-lectures-with-LaTeX/answer/Gilles-Castel-1/comment/42822941)

------
directive
This is pretty amazing. I regularly use LaTeX for typesetting homework at
school but have never been able to keep up during lectures. I'll have to look
into including this in my workflow.

------
j7ake
Beautiful notes! But I don't believe those figures are made using LaTeX and
Vim... I can't see how you convert keyboard strokes to nice figures shown in
the example.

~~~
mathblocks
From the original post:

> There, I ex­plained my work­flow of tak­ing lec­ture notes in LaTeX using
> Vim and how I draw fig­ures in Inkscape.

Looks like the author was using Inkscape earlier but may have switched to
something else recently. You can draw impressively beautiful diagrams in LaTeX
with TikZ although it can be a lot of work to do so with TikZ which would make
it difficult for live note taking.

------
burtonator
I have to make a plug for the project I'm working on as it seems like you guys
are the target market:

[https://getpolarized.io/](https://getpolarized.io/)

Polar allows students and researchers to keep all their research in one place,
take notes, highlights, annotations, etc.

You can tag your books and suspend resume reading without losing your place.

It also supports sync with Anki which is rather nice.

The one caveat is that I don't (yet) support math as well as I would like.

Latex is supported by summernote but I haven't enabled the module yet. I
usually wait for enough people to complain but math is definitely something I
want to support.

------
jacobmischka
While I don't plan on doing this during lectures, I will be taking some of
these tips to help when composing assignments and papers, thanks for posting!

------
MichaelMoser123
I use libre office writer, it has a very good math formula editor. (Unlike MS
word that keeps crashing when you try to write a math formula)

------
codebook
I've got the usefulness of Ultisnip in this article at least. I couldn't
understand everything else... mathematics?

------
jshowa3
I guess if you have high wpm, this might be feasible. I unfortunately don't,
even after constant practice.

------
Jerry2
Anyone know what theme/font he's using?

------
spongepoc
Oh look it's the daily 'look how inadequate you are for not doing this
unnecessary leet thing' post.

------
ejz
This is godly.

------
neatcoder
I have a similar but simpler setup. The crucial difference in my setup is that
instead of using full blown LaTeX, I use TeXMe --
[https://github.com/susam/texme](https://github.com/susam/texme) \-- which
supports Markdown and LaTeX.

So I write plain text files with Markdown + LaTeX, slap a single line of TeXMe
JavaScript either at the top or bottom, and open the file with browser to see
the rendered math.

Like the OP I use Vim too with some customization with :ino and :ab. Nothing
beats the editing productivity and convenience of Vim!

------
securitybear
Now that 'Escape' is not a real hardware key in the new Macbook Pro anymore
and even otherwise 'Escape' has always been one of the hard to reach keys,
what is workaround for avoiding the 'Escape' key in Vim?

~~~
feiss
some people use Shift Lock (which is barely used, and closer to pinky), and a
colleague of mine use the sequence 'ii'

~~~
securitybear
Did you mean Caps Lock? Which tool do you use? I found
[https://github.com/susam/uncap](https://github.com/susam/uncap) but it does
not have a MacOS binary.

~~~
rodorgas
You don't need any external program. Open System Preferences, go to Keyboard
and click on "Modifiers Keys...", then you can map Caps Lock to Esc.

------
kkarakk
i use onenote to import the pdf of the textbook and then annotate that. this
process seems like someone who doesn't know what to use their programming
skills for in order to over engineer a solution to a vaguely defined
problem(take pretty notes using software)

what is the point of recreating everything in the textbook again?

