I took notes in LaTeX in my college. I didn't need macros or the fancy editor setup. It's not hard. It turned passive learning into active. I didn't have a few of the formatting nuances as pretty as he did (e.g. boxes around theorems), but that's not hard.
The key difference between him and me are the figures. It's worth looking at his notes here:
The figures are beautiful.
How?!?!?!?
(Footnote due to recent bad experiences to pre-empt stupid answers: "Inkscape" is not an answer. I use Inkscape, and I know how long these things would take me. It's definitely not something I could do anywhere close to real-time. I want to know what conceivable workflow in Inkscape would allow those sorts of figures in even a significant fraction of lecture speed, let alone real-time)