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Comment by JohnHammersley | Hacker News Reader

And whilst this is shameless self-promotion, if you want to try out LaTeX without installing it yourself, please check out https://www.overleaf.com (I'm one of the founders)

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Virtually everyone at school used Overleaf. Impressive bit of kit, particularly since the version 2 update. I was fond of how v1 kept everything in a git repo though.

I liked that about v1 as well, but it seems like they have brought it over to v2 [0]. Trying it on a v2 project it only seems to have one commit for everything up until the first clone?

[0]: https://www.overleaf.com/blog/bringing-the-git-bridge-to-v2-...

I'll come in and say that Overleaf has been invaluable when you're working in teams and need real-time editing and/or your team members don't know how to/refuse to use Git (cough some academic settings cough)

I prefer git for the bulk of the writing process because it lets you make well structured commits, use your favorite editor, and doesn't depend on having a strong internet connection.

Even so, you can't beat overleaf for the final stages of paper submission when all the authors are making tiny typo fixes and style edits in all parts of the document concurrently.

Thank you for an absolutely awesome piece of software, my senior capstone in undergrad would have been so much worse without overleaf.

Thanks for all the lovely comments about Overleaf! I'd somehow missed them, and reading them all together now is a very nice way to end the day!

We're continuing to build on and improve the platform now that the ShareLaTeX integration is pretty much complete, so look out for more updates soon, and thanks again for all your support.

PS: Please do continue to tell all your friends nice things about Overleaf :)

Thank you so much for overleaf! It’s been such a great tool for multi-author papers but even for writing on your own it’s better than standalone latex. Unlike typical latex that would just refuse to compile if you forget to close a brace, overleaf/sharelatex will make a best effort and just mark the part of the source where you made a mistake

Overleaf got me through every math/CS course in my undergrad. Thank you for your amazing work.

Congrats on overleaf. Me and my colleagues use it everyday and we love it!

Please do more shameless promotion, latex is amazing and overleaf makes it very accessible.

For really mind-blowing possibilities, try org-mode[1] under emacs, along with org-babel[2] and LaTeX export.

You can pretty much write and execute your technical paper and your source code simultaneously in arbitrary languages.

I recommend the spacemacs[3] distribution, as the vi interface gets it right.

[1] https://orgmode.org/manual/index.html#Top

[2] https://orgmode.org/manual/Working-with-Source-Code.html#Wor...

[3] http://spacemacs.org/

Equally, AUCTeX in Emacs for direct editing of LaTeX (best TeX editor there is).

(For more complex documents, I've had better luck manipulating TeX directly rather than via another layer, e.g. Org mode, which is fantastic for other things.)

Agreed. Writing with AUCTex plus helm-bibtex is like a dream. I like org-mode but I find it a too limiting for actually writing papers in.

Would you mind elaborating what is so great about AUCTeX? What makes it the best LaTeX editor?

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