This is actually the method used by MS Word as far as I know, or a reduced dialect of it. It's a mix of convenient and inconvenient, can't make my mind up about it.
All I know is that LaTEX is much, much easier to manage than this jumbled mess...
All I know is that LaTEX is much, much easier to manage than this jumbled mess...
For me, I'm able to use both LaTeX and this, but the main points that make this more convenient to me is that it relies less on characters that are present in awkward locations in many keyboard layouts (such as {}) and the equivalent formula is often much shorter due to somewhat more advanced tokenizing (of course, specific to math input, as the format doesn't have the same constraints as a general-purpose programming and markup language), e.g. x^12 works for x to the power of 12 instead of resulting in x^1 2.
LaTeX is beautiful and powerful, but mixed with unicode (in the right doses) it becomes astonishingly more powerful. For example, you can keep the block constructors {} _ and ^, but use unicode symbols such as α, ∂, ∫, instead of \alpha, \partial, \int
Well, LaTeX itself is not very discoverable either
Software like Latexit and Mathpix also help a lot.
It follows a set of rules so you don't have to remember a large number of sequences but can often guess the right one intuitively.
ASCII digraphs for mathematical operators give the corresponding operator, e.g., <= yields ≤.
Greek letters are given by an asterisk followed by a corresponding latin letter, e.g., *d yields δ.
https://9fans.github.io/plan9port/man/man7/keyboard.html
There's a program (mklatinkbd) to convert it to a format usable with X11.
I have a standard keyboard and I type greek letters easily. ALTGR+a, and so on.
If somebody is not able to configure their keyboard to do this they are not probably writing LaTeX, either.
(Admittedly, this anecdata is even more useless than usual.)
The big disadvantage to LyX is that it's not LaTeX editor but a LaTeX generator. So if you want to write your next article or dissertation and can commit to it then it's great, but if you want to import work so far or collaborate with someone not using LyX then it doesn't really work (it has an import function but it's almost unusable).
Once you've done that once in the session, you can just hit C-\ to toggle it on and off (C-x RET C-\ [input method] actually lets you select from a wide variety of input methods, and C-\ toggles on and off the most recently selected input method).
As long as you don't need caps lock as your escape key...
Ctrl-k a Shift-8
Greek letters are always a latin letter followed by an asterisk. Arrows and comparison operators are what one would guess. Mathematical symbols generally make some sense:
<C-k> a * α
<C-k> F * Φ
<C-k> = > ⇒
<C-k> - > →
<C-k> > = ≥
<C-k> 0 0 ∞
<C-k> d P ∂
<C-k> I n ∫