This seems like a distraction from the substance.
In my experience studying physics, most of the learning happens by yourself trying to solve problems, putting hypothesis to yourself, trying, failing, examining what failed.
In my experience studying physics, most of the learning happens by yourself trying to solve problems, putting hypothesis to yourself, trying, failing, examining what failed.
Presumably when vim/LaTeX are mastered, they're as easy to use (and easier to read back) than pen/paper.
I don't understand why. Programming is supposed to help managing complexity by abstraction and I can't understand why it can't help solving math. My gut feeling is the lack of a good language (that's why I tried to wrote my own library). May be I should try out Typst as mentioned in other comments.
Regarding writing in LaTeX, I hate its syntax for the following reasons:
- global namespace: how can I make sure there's no collision and have sane naming convention? - lack of flexibility of characters to use: basically just \somethinglikethis rather than easier to read variables like something_like_that - macros are hard to reuse, "functions" are difficult to rewrite: code reuse is difficult. In deriving math (with big expressions), one often copy a lot of things while simplifying a portion of them. How to achieve writing the next line efficiently, when carrying from the previous lines? Defining repetitive terms and reuse in the next line is good, until I then need to further simplify in following lines. - bad default behaviors: \left ( ... \right ) is just so noisy to be read in plain text and undistracted. In order words, LaTeX is good at typesetting, which also makes it hard to type (and read) in plain text.
My own library is supposed to solve all these issues. But reusing is still a pain. In plain LaTeX, if you want to reuse an equation you typeset for another documentation, you could just copy and paste. But with a library, then you need to somehow manage the dependencies as well.
I will often generate ten pages of scribbled on paper to come up with one page of LaTeX homework. And the I joyfully crumple up the ten pages and recycle them.
Later, when I become a prof, I had a few students who were the same. Assignments done directly in latex. So I am by no means unique.