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Comment by version_five | Hacker News Reader

I have to disagree with you about LaTex being slower than word for equations. In fact, one of the big reasons I started using it was faster equation typing. And when word2003 was upgraded to 2007 or whatever came next, they actually changed the equation editor to allow latex style entry so you didnt have to click through the menus to get symbols.

What kind of shorthand do you use with your script? I honestly find latex's shorthand already short.

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The course I'm currently taking makes me uses symbols like the biconditional, xor, and quantifiers. Each symbol requires an entire word to type out but I also frequency have to look at a reference sheet to find the command for each symbol. I just use short hands like "-" for not, "and" for $\land$, etc. I'm sure if I used LaTex more often, I would have most of the commands memorized but I use it infrequency so I almost never remember.

I'm pretty sure you can create macros in LaTeX, not sure If this would solve your problem.

Back in high school I used OneNote and had a pretty good MS equation editor setup. Most things can be done in a similar way to LaTeX, e.g. writing \theta for greek letters, writing a slash for fractions. With a few "replace with" "macros" I could write quite fast, probably faster than I can in LaTeX these days after about the same amount of practice, and almost never had to use the GUI.

These days my notes are all Markdown with inline LaTeX for math. I haven't yet found an editor that support "global" LaTeX macros/shorthand. Things like matrices can be bit of a pain, but then I haven't written any since linear algebra.

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