Taking notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Taking notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim (2019)

castel.dev

233 pointsgeorgecmu106 comments

I would advise against trying to typeset lectures live, at least for my courses. I structure my lectures as an abstract detective work: start with a motivating problem or example, experiment with it, distill the key ideas, formalize them into definitions, deduce consequences (theorems, new problems). I expect my students to be active participants at each step. Paper notes work well for this, because they are both low overheard and sufficiently free-form. From my experience, students that typeset or try to write overly formal notes during class miss that crucial live narrative of my lectures; that makes me sad because I spend a ton of effort in this story-building.

I do think proper typesetting is a great idea afterwards, during its own dedicated phase; it is like the report-building stage of the detective work, where findings are revisited and structured so the detective can reflect on the case, compare it with others and have a reference for the future.

For anyone interested in my very opinionated patterns for latex typesetting in Vim, I have a github page with vim templates [0] and some demos at reddit [1].

[0] https://github.com/ykonstant1/dotfiles

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/jtjol5/cinnamon_l...

I had been an avid latex note taker since my college days though I used Emacs Org Mode. I consider writing your own notes in the form of a well-typeset book extremely rewarding as it kind of forces you to distill concepts better. For instance, I would actively seek out additional historical origins of a formulae or an associated anecdote or analogy for helping others to better understand the concept. My motivation largely was to write in a way such that it would help others understand better.

This exercise inspired me to build my own learning platform from scratch that generates a latex-generated books at the end of course completion. The idea is to have interactive conversations while learning and at the end the personalized book is generated for you. You can see an example of personalized Python book here: https://tinyurl.com/3xfsunj9

You can see that the conversations between learner and Primer highlighted as red sprinkled throughout the book.

The learner doesn't need to write any equations or code examples as it is generated for them. They can further customize the notebook by adding notes or questions using prompts.[1]

Right now there are two free courses on the platform[2], and 5 more would be added by the end of the month. But the goal is create self-paced computer science degree.

[1]: https://primerlabs.io/blog/introducing-primer/#the-problem-o...

[2]: https://primerlabs.io

Your classes sound amazing. In my experience though, seldom a professor or a TA tries that hard to prepare an engaging lesson.

And certainly, it'd be a shame to be busy "live-latexing" notes for your class, but I think in the vast majority of classes, for someone really adept at it, it might work.

My research lately is quite meta, and involved in breaking down the various ways in which dissemination of knowledge can be structured. Mind if I borrow this analogy and test it out on some students? Something about it resonated.

Go ahead!

I took notes on my courses in LaTeX, and I didn't find it detrimental. If anything, it was way faster to write and understand them later. And it is easier to write whatever you need to keep track of the lecture and then modify it later (or during the lecture) than to have some paper notes where you need to first complete them and then organize them.

Not to mention that it's far easier to collaborate with LaTeX notes than paper. For example, we split the courses between friends so only one took LaTeX notes, the rest paid attention or took quick annotations on paper to later complete the notes.

The notation in the lecture couldn't have been that complex then. Or the pace that rapid.

What about diagrams?

For complex notation I had a keyboard distribution with symbols available (e.g., α is alt-a, ∩ is alt + shift + i, ∈ is alt + shift + [) and also made commands to abbreviate, which made it faster than writing (and more consistent). The pace depended on the lecture, but I had no issues keeping up with the teachers speaking/writing pace. If the class was being too complex and I couldn't understand and write in my own words, I just went into "memory dump mode" and wrote whatever and then understood and reformatted it later.

For diagrams I had several options. Simple ones were easy enough to do with Tikz (maybe I didn't get it perfectly on the first try but good enough to fix later), diagrams that had a repeated structure were done with commands, and then for the ones that I couldn't do on the fly I just either wrote the description in text and did them later, or did a drawing in a notebook/phone/took a picture and then replicated it later with Tikz. I could also take diagrams from the web and paste the image.

If you want examples, we actually had all our note PDFs in a shared Dropbox folder [1] (in Spanish, though). Not all of them are mine, but there are a good bunch of them where I'm the main author. I'm specially proud of some notes, like the differential geometry course [2] or topology [3] with a good amount of diagrams (for a math course).

1: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/kbymf37cykz77ha/AADuRd3CoU6UUCZMt...

2: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/kbymf37cykz77ha/AAA1SKV3JLkVPX2nc...

3: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/kbymf37cykz77ha/AABNb9rTsaRzc-3xP...

well done

Blind person here. I've been using LaTex for note taking since age 15. Since braille typewriters are heavy and clunky and electronic braille notetakers are expensive, I decided it was the right thing to do pretty early on. I started doing this when I transferred out of blind school. Being able to compile my notes into a PDF was definitely useful, considering I had to work with teachers who didn't have any experience with blind people before.

When I got to college, I started requesting all the materials that students normally get in LaTeX. PDFs generated with pdflatex and similar aren't screen reader accessible, but I could read the LaTeX source code just fine.

Obviously, what I write for myself isn't pure, compilable LaTeX, I usually omit the dollar signs, write things like 2^32 instead of 2^{32} etc.

By the way, the linked post was almost unreadable to screen readers, the soft dash characters inserted between every syllable made my screen reader say every syllable separately, which breaks the pronunciation rules.

> the soft dash characters inserted between every syllable

What CMS or editor outputs that? It's insane. I tried copying the text into a text editor and it displayed all the dashes: "math-e-mat-ics".

Hum, so when you copy the text and post it into Notepad, it's written with a ton of dashes at places I can't make sense of (not syllables or every word). If you post it in this text box or in Word, it looks normal, I can't even figure out how to share it here (without manually "dashing") except this screenshot : https://imgur.com/DWRJlKf.

I am very confused, what's up with this?

The character is Unicode U+00AD, the soft hyphen: "= discretionary hyphen" / "commonly abbreviated as SHY" / "an invisible format character indicating a possible hyphenation location"

https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0080.pdf

I know of it, but apparently I've never previously pasted text using it into my text editor, because it's displayed there as a hyphen (though it is still U+00AD).

I'm wondering what CMS/editor outputs so many SHY characters.

It appears to be a site generated with react+Gatsby. Would be interesting to figure it out which text component is responsible for this odd text decoration

I think they are some weird line wrapping hint characters? If I paste it into Pop OS's text editor I can only see the dashes if I shrink the editor to cause word wrapping, and it will insert the dashes at the wrap. It seems like some UTF magic that I hate!

Likely, the site was set up before all browsers supported automatic hyphenation (fairly recently), and the soft hyphens were added to assist with hyphenation.

> considering I had to work with teachers who didn't have any experience with blind people before.

Sorry you had to pave the way.

> PDFs generated with pdflatex and similar aren't screen reader accessible, but I could read the LaTeX source code just fine.

That's... sad. Is Word any better?

> Sorry you had to pave the way.

It's something I think we're all used to, and will likely always be the case, because non-elderly blind people are such a tiny minority (perhaps we're even over-represented here on HN).

pdflatex, just like TeX, comes from an 8-bit past, so it will frequently resort to custom encodings to fit all the glyphs in a single 255-character font. That means that any 8-bit "character" (in PDF bytes, what is really copy-pasteable or readable by TTS system) can actually stand for any displayable character.

Perhaps XeTeX is better?

(I am not intimately familiar with what pdf(la)tex does, but this is how TeX works, and I've seen those PDFs, esp with eg. Cyrillic, which on select show up garbled text)

Obviously the author can take these notes and be a mathematical success. That's amazing. Personally, I confess that I don't have enough cycles to both understand a lecture and live-LaTeX it. (Can I add that I am a math PhD and also very experienced with LaTeX? So if you feel that this may be too much for you, IMHO that's OK).

I'll second this. I am very familiar with latex. I have even done similar things to my neovim configuration (I use ultisnips) and have a few custom latex 'sty'les to include various commands to do stuff I do frequently but is a pain otherwise.

This however is and was for end-product stuff: my own personal collection of condensed notes, assignments that needed to be typed, and so on (I also use ultisnips for coding). I studied mathematics as a undergrad (I have a first class degree in Mathematics from a UK university) and I hand-wrote my lectures, and I know many mathematicians that are frankly much better than I am who find computers frankly difficult and avoided LaTeX as long as they possibly could.

What matters (if you are studying mathematics) is doing mathematics (exercises, experimentation, understanding proofs etc). There is no substitute. This is a nice to have, but will not make you a better mathematician. If you want to know how to be a good student, IMO this is a nice guide: https://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/system/files/attachments/study_pu...

Interesting - once I got into a rythym I didn't find tex-ing live lectures actually that time consuming. I think it really depends on the field of math though, maybe?

I also use a markdown + inline latex setup rather than tex from scratch.

I found it was relatively easy to type and tex everything that was written on the board. But I think my comprehension probably suffered a bit, though maybe that would have happened from using a pen and paper too.

Agreed - I ultimately just stopped taking notes.

I typed notes throughout my undergrad, and it worked poorly. Everything in math is slow to type and fast to handwrite: subscripts, exponents, arrows, matrices, Greek letters, labels, diagrams, integrals, fractions. My shorthand omitted all latex conventions (A_0 became A0, arrows became ->), but it wasn't enough.

For non-math classes, typing notes worked well.

It's useful to know that \to and \gets are shorthands for \rightarrow and \leftarrow.

I found the ability to copy and paste and then modify while taking notes more than made up for the difference in note-taking speed.

It depends on the subject matter for me. Live-LaTeXing works pretty well for me until matrices get involved. Just fractions, equations, and summations are fairly easy though.

Your nick rings some bells. [linear algebra etc].

Indeed, I think the same and am on the very same boat.

Can you explain a bit about your personal note taking/retention process?

Forgive me, there is nothing to explain. I bring paper and pencil. Boring.

Take a look at what you do remember easily, and then game your note taking process, so that you add that stimulus/reward to your note taking. Maybe it's paper, maybe it's a computer, maybe it 's a fountain pen. Maybe you're like me and your retention is better if you're fully engaged and not taking notes. I see notes as some see a camera. You're so busy trying to transcribe what you're seeing, you're not fully comprehending it till later, and that's only if you're good at notes, otherwise, you now have a dumbass teaching you when you could have been listening to the litteral expert in their field explain it, paying better attention and understanding it; rather than memorizing it. Once you understand it, you're not memorizing, you're explaining. But that's just how I work. Find what works for you.

The person you're addressing like they're 16 and asking for your guidance is a literal expert in their field(s). (See https://hefferon.net/ )

Thank you for the kind words, but I nodded when I read the parent post. It reminded me of something my wife and I talk about, how we took a lot of video when our kids were young, and maybe we should have just enjoyed more of the time.

Apologies, I intended to comment on the same one you replied to, not to your comment. I remember struggling so hard in school to take notes, and then not understanding them.

I hadn't heard of you, but really respect what you're doing. I hope I didn't cause offence.

> offence

Heavens, no. Enjoy the day.

Really?

Welcome to HN! Where the guy that I'm giving hobby car advice to is something of an idol in my professional field.

Newton may have stood on the shoulders of giants, but HN enables us to casually rub elbows with them.

I replied to the wrong comment, I meant to reply to the person above. The one that asked for guidance, like they were a college student struggling...

In my university we can take photos after a topic was explained. The prof told us, that he wants us to understand the topic and ask questions while he was explaining.

I did this too for a while. It's a fun challenge for yourself and a cool way to brag to your friends. Paper is such a better interface though and real time latex takes away too much of your attention from the lecture I found in the end (the best way to attend a lecture is to barely write anything imo, just some rough notes while mostly spending your time in your head - if you missed something look at a friends' notes or handouts after).

Note-taking is very individual. I found out in university that the act of writing lecture notes helps me focus and remember. Otherwise my mind would drift. In fact, I soon realized that I should write my own lecture notes, even if I never look at them afterwards. And only paper is good enough for fast writing of math.

I used a tablet pc during my math bachelor's (convertible laptop computer with Wacom that existed 2002~2008). A couple years back I still used a Samsung Android tablet with pen (and squid). If I went back to school now I'd probably use an iPad and pen, or perhaps one of those wacom enabled e-readers (remarkable, boox?)

I end up doodling, which I found helps my thought process immensely.

Indeed. Paper still remains king. Or a fancy iPad with a pen if you can afford it, I certainly don't have the money for it.

Plug: I recently created a new LaTeX editing environment for Emacs with automatic inline rendering of math, TikZ diagrams, and tables:

https://github.com/dandavison/xenops

It creates plain LaTeX files that can be shared with non-Emacs users, but also works with org-mode. Math preview images are SVG by default and are crisp on high res / retina screens.

When reading the article I was thinking "shit, maybe I have to learn drop emacs and finally learn vim". But then u post your emacs latex plugin and I can perish that thought.

(Do any of the features work in the terminal?)

Hi, Emacs can't display images when it is running as a terminal application, so probably only makes sense to use xenops with Emacs running as a real graphical application.

Looks really nice, got to try it out.

I'm currently a mathematics undergraduate at Cambridge and there's quite a few students who live type notes in various different formats. I think that the majority of the learning curve comes when getting used to the format of writing in LaTeX, and once you have that down (so that typing both prose and mathematics takes little to no effort) you can type notes faster than you can write them - with the small exception of maybe matrices and certain advanced things which slow you down.

The benefit of having typed notes at least for me come from being able to search, having a good record of my own understanding of a course and also not having to rely on keeping handwritten notes safe. They also look pretty which is a bonus for studying from them.

Examples:

- Analysis I (which have been edited): https://adamkelly.me/files/ia-analysis-i/analysis-i.pdf

- Graph Theory (not edited but diagrams added): https://adamkelly.me/files/ii-graph-theory/graph-theory.pdf

As a side note, one other thing I do is write short 'handouts' on topics that I think I have something to say about. For example https://adamkelly.me/files/handouts/direct-products/direct-p....

I am always in awe of people like you. I have no idea how someone can type \frac{}{} faster than I can draw a horizontal line (while listening to a lecturer), but I believe you.

Meanwhile I use Onenote. I don't have to worry about keeping notes safe, or the stress of trying to type at warpspeed. I would go with a Remarkable tablet but now with subscription pricing it's a non starter.

Latex specific ide \frac and auto fill. You can for sure get speedy with practice!

Those beautiful graphs now… I ended up using secondary programs to gen images (pdf or whatever) of graphs and such for latex to bring in the usual way. Not as good!

My recollection is that the main speed advantage lay in being able to copy-paste the previous line when working through a derivation.

I live-LaTeXed notes for a couple of years in undergrad but eventually went back to pen + paper (approximately all my assignments continued to be typeset, though).

Great stuff! I am in awe of your beautifully done graphs.

For speed with, e.g. matrices like you say, but also more specialized course specific notation, could you build a set of quick functions for the topic of the day to aid note taking?

If set up your environment just so, you can repurpose really simple commands like the slash in “\this” to do some common but annoying thing like bold upright lettering or underbars or something. (I actually need to go look at latex to be sure what all you could make maximally parsimonious… it’s been a while and I mostly copy and paste my old commands around. Anyway, you probably already do this kind of thing.

Maybe I'm missing something but why do I need to write notes like textbook when textbooks already exist. I have only taken applied math courses, but when I go to lectures I'm trying to create a mental model of how the various assumptions, statements and theorems relate to one another. I need to listen to the lecture on the arguments of how the proof works, create examples, counter examples and outliers to test the proof. Its very hard to even write basic handwritten notes when the lecture goes on without breaking the flow. But then maybe I'm probably just a datapoint around the median.

For me, typesetting my handwritten notes was part of the learning process. Usually one textbook is not enough for me, I always reference multiple sources (textbook, lecture notes, blog posts, homework problems) when learning so it's helpful to put a condensed version of everything in one place. Textbooks usually have a lot of fluff. My personal notes are also really helpful as reference material later -- three months from now I probably won't remember anything that I read today.

Our professors would often mention tips and tricks that weren't in the textbook. It's only through lecture notes that we could remember them given how much information there was.

After all, if the lecture is just the textbook, why bother going at that point? :)

People learn in different ways. Personally, I've always been a "learn by using my hands" person, and in college I was a meticulous note taker. I could never use the method you described, but have met others like that too.

I’m the same way. You don’t need notes when you understand the underlying concepts. For me it is better to spend 100% of my concentration on the prof and ask questions when something doesn’t make sense.

That worked for me in courses which provided context, or where proof were short and simple. Then I took a real analysis seminar where very little motivation was provided, and couldn't grok the proof in the time provided. If I had better memory or faster understanding or read ahead I would have been fine... ended up taking detailed notes and trying to fit it all back together after the course, which was not very efficient.

Typing notes is probably the worst way to encode things into your memory. There's been plenty of research on this and I'm not going to regurgitate it here, but the process of handwriting notes does a lot to help you remember things even if you never look at those notes again. There are people with disabilities that prevent them from handwriting notes, but everyone else is better served by handwritten notes.

> but everyone else is better served by handwritten notes.

Completely disagree here. You need to find the setup that works for you, and for a lot of people that setup will be taking notes in a computer.

And I know this because in my class me and a few friends took computer notes, and we did really well. In my personal case, my handwriting is terrible and gets worse by the hour. By the fourth lecture of the day, my paper notes were an incomprehensible mess. Reformatting, organizing and sorting those notes took quite some time and then searching or referencing other pages was impossible.

When taking LaTeX notes, I could write at the same speed as when I was writing by hand, got less tiring, could pay more attention to the lecture (I can just go on and write things on the computer without looking and worry about them later, but I can't handwrite without looking).

Then later I could go back, rewrite the parts that needed rewriting, reference the parts that needed referencing, put graphs, paste links, whatever. And it was really helpful to have a document where I could iterate and improve the notes as my knowledge and understanding of the contents improved. You know how they say that you don't really understand something until you can explain it? Well, rewriting my notes was my process to understand things. And it would be impossible to have done it if I had to take paper notes.

Also, I could do the exercises on the same document (in an appendix) and quickly reference the theorems, and also work with my friends to correct/review the exercises. Again, impossible to do with paper notes.

An important part missing in this is to add symbols to your keyboard layout. Instead of typing \alpha, just type α. To type \cap, write ∩. I used a StackOverflow answer [1] to build a key layout [2] for my Spanish mac keyboard, but this should be easily replicated for other systems and languages

1: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/110042/entering-unic...

2: https://github.com/gjulianm/MathUnicode

For Linux users, see this Unix.SE post for adding new symbols to a keyboard layout: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/674997/new-keyboard...

Note that is my own self-answered question and answer, after having difficulty. For completeness' sake all steps involved in adding new symbols to the keyboard - desktop agnostic - are included in that question.

Discussed at the time:

How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19448678 - March 2019 (221 comments)

How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19440652 - March 2019 (6 comments)

I'm always envious of people who have vim/emacs setups that appear so clean and functional.

I just think to my cobbled-together vim setup which both had a long startup and was riddled with idiosyncrasies (both I'm sure caused by my own misconfiguration).

I since have migrated to spacemacs, thinking that I could let people more competent than I do the brunt of configuration, but still I have managed to make the startup long and the experience janky.

I guess I should either spend more or less time configuring my setups...

I'm the same in desiring a preconfigured setup. I think it's similar with how I like the same thing but for a tiling window manager like i3/sway. I suspect there might be a fair few who still prefer the vim or emacs environment that want a preconfigured setup with a basic level of configuration, as is commonly offered by a desktop environment.

I like leaving the configuration to someone who I know has a better understanding of all the offerings. I realise this may not appeal to someone who has strong opinions or similar level of understanding as these maintainers however.

I might mention, if you hadn't already been aware of it, that SpaceVim exists as well. I really like the concept of layers, the bundling of packages for different features for basic/simple configuration (both SpaceVim/Emacs have this).

Usually what happens when I try a text editor, shell, etc. is that I'm happy with 95% of the features but there are a few things that nag at me. And inevitably I go down a rabbit hole of hacks until I end up with (an approximation of) my desired feature. If I do that enough times then something ends up wonky until my whole setup is kinda scuffed.

As an example pertinent to this post, I repeatedly have to dismiss notifications from pdflatex about some sort of incompatibility with my setup. I think it's relative line numbering, I'm not sure though. My attempts to fix it have only resulted in pdf files occasionally opening as raw code.

I will take a look at SpaceVim, though. I've been using vanilla vim for a while to edit personal stuff because I don't want to open spacemacs...

When I was in college I submitted printed assignments generated with LaTeX; made it easier for the teacher to grade and I was able to do a fair bit of copy/paste.

Taking notes in real time, however, is a whole different beast.

Back in school I did hand written notes in class and retyped them in TeX when preparing for exams. I found this to be the best way for me to learn and retain.

I can't imagine live TeXing a graph or tree diagram

Just kind of a side note - Gilles's work is such a pleasure to browse, worth taking a look. Always made with deep understanding of the content and a spartan taste in design: https://castel.dev/notes

I did an experimental stint of turning in problem sets in TeX and found it to be very time consuming, though part of the exercise was to write up the solutions carefully and that took time too. I don't think I could possibly take notes in class that way. Also, typing in class would bother people, I expect.

One of my professors told me that the best way to do notes was write down normal quick ones in class, but then at home, rewrite the notes in complete sentences including the stuff you remember from the lecture that you didn't originally write down. He said this was a big help in absorbing and retaining the material. It sounded like a good idea, though I was too disorganized to actually try it.

For the majority of my studies I took notes in Word and it’s equation editor (LaTeX syntax is most of what you need to know for it)

It was great for sharing and searching notes, but definitely challenging.

Once in a while when a diagram was needed it would be really challenging to do (no stylus or touchscreen back then), and when a new math symbol showed up for the first time it would be a challenge.

In other times it could be useful, like if there’s a lot of matrices being written copy and pasting helps.

Overall, it was a good experience since for later math research I needed to know LaTeX well anyhow. But the flexibility of pen and paper can’t be matched.

I did this back in 2011, though I used OpenOffice (and now I believe it's LibreOffice) at first, its equation editor syntax was a lot like LaTeX. I didn't realize MS Word had a text input option for its equation editor.

Eventually I decided to switch to Vim and LaTeX though (I was pretty new to both). The OP's setup looks much fancier than what I did, I just used pdflatex and mupdf. Diagrams I would draw by hand on paper.

I am grateful to have my notes in a nice clean searchable pdf now 10 years later, but unfortunately my career in software has yet to have me actually do differential equations again.

I have to ask because I miss it so dearly: is there any modern alternative to a 10" netbook like what I had back then? Besides the GPD win that was posted a few days ago. And I don't like the idea of a super expensive tablet with its heavy screen.

What do students take notes on now?

And despite my love of netbooks from that era, part of what had me switch to Vim/LaTeX was my cheap ~$100 netbook not being very quick with large documents in an editor like LibreOffice.

Also a random thought: the netbook had also come with "windows 7 starter edition", which didn't let you change the wallpaper, much to my frustration. They went so far as (I believe) hashing the image, so if you edited it at all then it would show a black screen. [1]

I think that was what got me into Linux, despite years of losing access to wifi every time I updated and lost the Broadcom wifi drivers. My current laptop doesn't even have an ethernet port, I wonder how people get into Linux now.

[1]: The argument of "this laptop is resource constrained so it needs a simpler version of windows" seems weak when they go to such great lengths to enforce it. Maybe it was more about selling it for cheap and expecting some people to upgrade? Imagine paying $60 for windows for a <$150 netbook. (Maybe it was actually $200, I forget)

An 11" Chromebook maybe?

I'm done with classes as of last year but I just used pen & paper in all my schooling. I would rewrite my notes on a tablet after class though. It's more common to see people using iPads and Surfaces than when I first started.

I have heard that the latest chromebooks make it easier to switch into linux mode. I bought one a few years ago and had to go through some hacks to run linux, and every time I power it on, it would tell me to press space bar to "fix" everything and wipe the harddrive.

Was the tablet not a good fit for real time handwriting? Is it a bit slower than pen and paper?

Linux is better supported on Chromebooks now. Some of them have been officially blessed by Google to do it so there shouldn't be any problems like that.

Haha it was fine for real time handwriting, I just did that because it forced me to go through my notes again and I felt like using a tablet may have been more distracting for me and other people.

I used a Microsoft Surface Pro for a math course. It was great. The pen could be better but you learn to write with it.

Cool, did it have a physical keyboard? And if so, what was it like when using it like a laptop? That's my main aversion to a tablet, I would prefer a laptop so I could precisely angle a screen and the screen wouldn't be so heavy.

Also the price since I would almost exclusively use it for traveling.

You can use a USB keyboard on it, and a tablet is more ergonomic when its not attached to a keyboard so you can position them differently. I really like the better ergonomics of a magic keyboard from Apple, but its too expensive compared to a USB/BT keyboard you can positon anywhere. Tablets are actually better for positioning, since you end up bending your back when using keyboards. https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MJQL3LL/A/magic-keyboard-...

Surface Pro 3 works great with linux when I used it, but you can't replace anything on it. If you just want to use a laptop you already have this is a good option. https://www.amazon.com/XP-PEN-Graphic-Drawing-Digital-Teachi...

Ah, I did. The type cover/keyboard is necessary. It works well in laptop mode while on a table. It is harder to use in laptop mode on a lap, but possible with practice.

The price is worth it, I think -- I have a friend who I convinced to get one, and lo after his research group saw him using one handful of people bought them as well :)

This is a very cool setup but in my experience not using pen-and-paper makes comprehension terribly inefficient, if not impossible, during class especially when it comes to subjects like math. Besides, even excessive note-taking can impede the learning process. Best is to pay close attention to what the lecturer says and occasionally write down a few key ideas.

I was going to say the same. I'd takes notes, but most of my attention was on the professor and what they were saying. When there was something I knew I wouldn't remember, that's when focused switched to taking good notes. Otherwise it consumes an awful lot of brain-powee/attention, and well, there's a textbook if you really want textbook style notes.

Something similar for Emacs, inspired by this Vim method:

https://karthinks.com/software/latex-input-for-impatient-sch...

Not my field, but I find it interesting to see how it is possible to optimize one environment for specific tasks.

For quick self notes I use Markdown. I found most rendering engines support $math$ these days. Either that or pen-and-paper/tablet/remarkable.

Joplin is fantastic for creating and organizing references as long as you don't need advanced layouts. When you need them you can very quickly convert MD syntax to html or latex.

On a side note I always wonder who has the time of fine tuning uber-specialized text editor configuration at those levels. Not only that, but also having the burden of maintaining that and the inconvenience of being dependent on a very specific setup. I could see myself doing such an effort only after 4-5 years of daily use and friction.

When I was in college, I used Grapher on Mac OS X to take all my math notes. It was very quick and used some LaTeX-like keyboard shortcuts. I'd copy the equations I generated into TextEdit (side note: I still miss the RTFD bundle format now that I use Windows and Linux). No doubt my professors thought I was just dicking around because I was the only person taking notes on a laptop but it was very nice and the results were much more legible than my handwritten notes.

I tried all sort of ways of taking notes in math class using LaTeX, an iPad, etc. I had the most success using pencil and paper. You want as little friction as possible, especially trying to remember latex syntax. Remember, math been done handwritten for centuries. Unless you're getting syntax help like with programming, pencil and paper is a safe bet.

I'm curious about the correlation (or lack of) between this kind of note taking and the ability to talk and type at the same time. I can take high level concept notes, but not details. And I can't talk and type at the same time all. Always figured it was a shared brain thing between the talking and the typing.

I just wish all uni's and colleges recorded their lectures by default. That way we can focus on what's important in class and if we missed something we'd be able to watch the recorded lecture. Trying to write down what's being said and written AND focusing on the lecture at the same time is hard.

Never explained how diagrams e.g. top of this page[1] can be done mid-lecture.

[1] https://castel.dev/static/cb323a2ec665d98f93f78e13d3972e0e/4...

See https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-2/

I always hated trying to take notes and pay attention at the same time. Can someone explain why teachers just make the lecture notes available so students can just listen to the lecture and review the notes later?

This showcase in particular is what inspired me to pick up vim and LaTeX, and later pick up emacs. I could not have come back to my degree again without these tools. Many thanks to the author for the inspiration.

(2019)

Added. Thanks!

Pen and pare are much better, but congratulations for achieving it!

Nothing will make me switch me from my fountain pen on good paper, but this site got me to actually check out ultiSnips, which is amazing.

Somewhat off topic, the very need for students to take notes during a math lecture seems completely idiotic to me, in this day an age when a professor could just share the link to the handout with their students. The margins should be wide enough for the students to be able to “personalize” the notes (they have to study them later anyway, don’t they?), or the notes could be distributed in the source format to begin with.

As someone who is currently taking a math class, the point of taking notes isn’t to have a record of what was taught. Rather taking notes helps me concentrate on the lecture instead of having my mind wander and for whatever reason hand writing the notes helps the concepts sink into my memory better than just listening to the lecture and reviewing the handouts. A lot of times I’ll take notes and then throw them out in a few days because the handouts and textbook are better for actually reviewing the topics later and the notes have already served their purpose of helping me learn from the lectures.

I don't think it's idiotic. Writing makes you think and remember better than just being passive.

Not explained is the live-preview, both of the whole document and the line by line renders; how is this achieved?

vimtex is so nice. At every new LaTeX project I have, I find out something new about its capabilities; I had never heard of the concealment before.

EDIT: this seems to actually be vanilla vim. vimtex is still great, though!

I've created and use www.monsterwriter.app It's a modern LyX

paper, pencil.

review, rewrite.

It's not just the math notation. Often there are diagrams, that illustrate, or facilitate mathematical reasoning.

Seems like a bad idea for recall.

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