63 ms·

How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim

703 points by tambourine_man 8y ago

hliyan 8y ago
> which makes for a total of more than 1700 pages of notes That's an absolutely incredible feat, especially considering that the notes look pretty much textbook-quality! Although personally, I have never been able to both absorb a lecture and take electronic notes. If I need comprehension, my notes have always had to be pen-and-paper. Once again, this is an incredible feat.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
  > If I need comprehension, my notes have always had to be pen-and-paper. I agree. However, if I want to be able to refer to them afterwards, I really need to take electronic notes.
  - randomsearch 8y ago
    Agreed. So we have this problem that can only be resolved by taking notes with a pen before typing them up. This has the nice opportunity of reviewing them whilst typing, and puts pressure on you to ensure understanding when making notes.
    - jjeaff 8y ago
      Or use one of the many handwriting recognition apps and take pictures of the hand notes. You don't actually want to convert the handwriting to text, because there will be errors. But it should be good enough to create a search index.
nso95 8y ago
1700 pages? You've just rewritten the textbook. That doesn't seem like a good use of time.
directive 8y ago
This is pretty amazing. I regularly use LaTeX for typesetting homework at school but have never been able to keep up during lectures. I'll have to look into including this in my workflow.
codebook 8y ago
I've got the usefulness of Ultisnip in this article at least. I couldn't understand everything else... mathematics?
markkm 8y ago
Good ol' Live-TeXing. Googling "LiveTeXing" will show you other examples of this, if you are curious to see more. For those who aren't already familiar with Vim, Kile 3.0 beta is a fine substitute. It does most of what's described in the post in a GUI environment.
kinkrtyavimoodh 8y ago
As a feat in itself this is definitely very impressive, but I wonder if it's really worth anyone's time to spend precious lecture time with your mind fully occupied in the mechanical task of taking notes rather than actually absorbing and engaging with the content. Especially for an extremely content-dense subject like Mathematics, where you need all your concentration just to process what you are reading and follow along the logic. There is absolutely no dearth of study material on the internet. It's one thing to take notes as part of your study process. There it helps solidify your understanding. But surely taking notes on the fly when you have been barely introduced to the subject isn't going to help with that.
- phoenixstrike 8y ago
  Glad to see this at the top, agree 100%. I’m definitely going to copy some of OP’s setting and snippets, but not for real time use during a lecture. A textbook is an infinitely better reference than any notes one could take in class. Read the damn book. Lecture time should be for asking questions when you have a freaking live expert professor literally presenting the material to you. Ask all the small, nuanced questions that you can think of in the moment, which you can’t find answers to easily online or in the book. Not to downplay the efficient workflow here, but there is zero chance that this person’s notes are actually better than a real textbook.
  - roel_v 8y ago
    That's fine amd dandy from a US perspective, but many European universities are different. I don't know about this guy's exact class, but some (many?) undergrad classes are 500 people in a lecture hall with the professor orating, no textbook, and the content on the exam is pretty much whatever was covered during the lectures. So accurate note taking is very important because those notes essentially are your textbook. Hence the small business of students assembling high quality lecture notes and selling them to people who have't been to class (much).
    - kinkrtyavimoodh 8y ago
      At that point smuggling an audio recorder to the class might lead a better reproduction of the material.
DantesKite 8y ago
That's quite remarkable that you were able to do so many things so effortless in real-time. And all the notes look so beautiful.
blastbeat 8y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19440652 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19440652
_emacsomancer_ 8y ago
Very cool & beautiful notes! I'm looking forward to seeing how the author live-TeX's figures - I'd love to get better at creating figures in TeX even in a slower, more offline context. Having to drop to Python in some cases seems non-ideal though. If only there were some editor with good, customisable scripting built-in.....
twiceaday 8y ago
I did the same thing when I was in uni. Couple of my profs asked for my notes so they can make class notes for next year. I also did all of my math assignments this way and it was so easy copying stuff from the notes and working with it without erasing and compromising on space. I could break down every algebraic step for maximum clarity.
jclay 8y ago
I used to do this, but I switched to just using a Jupyter Notebook. It’s nice to be able to move between multiple computers, with no need to set up a LaTeX install. A couple of things I love about this setup: I can write in Markdown and drop to LaTeX when I need to forumalate any equations. For homework, I can implement a quick Python script inline to build intuition behind a topic. I can use Sympy to simplify and solve for more complex derivations. This outputs LaTeX which I can paste into the requisite Markdown cell. With Plotly, I can quickly create a nice 2D or 3D visualization.
- Cybiote 8y ago
  Hi, what sort of complex derivations can you solve for with Sympy?
  - mkl 8y ago
    Tons of different things: https://www.sympy.org/en/features.html https://www.sympy.org/en/features.html. Try it for yourself: https://live.sympy.org/ https://live.sympy.org/ E.g. find critical points on a surface: e = (x-y+2)*(x**2+y**2-9) solve([e.diff(x), e.diff(y)], [x, y]) Note that this online demo runs at a restricted speed; locally (e.g. install Anaconda and use Jupyter Notebook or QtConsole) it's much faster.
yaseer 8y ago
This is impressive. There is no way I would be able to take these notes, live, and learn the mathematics simultaneously. So this approach wouldn't be a good idea for me, and perhaps most people. But if you're able to do that, then it's doubly impressive.
redbumble 8y ago
Hey, for note taking using markdown and mathjax, I also like Typora (https://typora.io https://typora.io) a lot. Easy to install, wysiwym, works out-of-the-box!
- mathblocks 8y ago
  I do the same thing (markdown and mathjax) but I use TeXMe (https://github.com/susam/texme https://github.com/susam/texme). I like TeXMe a lot because it turns any Markdown and LaTeX notes into a self-rendering file. Just open your Markdown+LaTeX notes in any browser and it renders itself beautifully, almost looks like a paper. It is not wysiwyg though. But for me the convenience of distributing my Markdown+LaTeX source itself that can render in any browser without a separate compilation/processing step is a huge win! See https://github.com/susam/texme#get-started https://github.com/susam/texme#get-started if you are curious how it works.
semitext 8y ago
Neat. I'm a self-taught developer, and I learned a lot by watching MIT computer science lectures on youtube while taking notes in a markdown file. But I definitely hit a wall when I tried to follow the Mathematics for Computer Science course. I didn't have a good way to handle the notation. Ultimately though I think if I ever decide to follow through with that I'll probably just write in a notebook and scan the documents so I can easily reference them. But I love the dedication to figuring this out!
z3t4 8y ago
This reminds me of the sole draining * job as a "web developer" to turn word documents into HTML. I imagine such a job also exist in science, but instead of Word to HTML you turn paper notes into LaTeX. He could probably make good money helping professors write papers. * You coded since you where 15 years old, wrote your own game engine, wanted to cure cancer and save the world, and now your job is to copy text from one document to another.
- krageon 8y ago
  The best response to having to do dumb work like this is to automate it with regex, bash (and possibly an unzipping tool - aren't word documents zipped xml?) and take the time that people previously gave you to do the task to tweak your scripts and learn things you find interesting. I got through my dumbest student jobs that way, which was almost all of my student jobs.
  - mkesper 8y ago
    Pandoc can bring you quite far here.
  - z3t4 8y ago
    I got a friend that basically automated his job, the management was not pleased, and forced him to go back to doing it manually ... He managed to get another job. But figured out he wanted to work with actual software development, and it also seems to be a shortage of software developers. But it was virtually impossible to get a job without a degree or experience. So he's now at age 45 enrolling a five year university program to become an engineer on paper ...
    - creatornator 8y ago
      This is so unfortunate, but I'm not surprised. What kind of poor management, when met with an efficiency that could double an employee's output by automating their current job, limits it back to the 50% efficiency? I've met some managers like that...
zadwang 8y ago
The techniques in the article definitely are useful to improve efficiency of typing math. I have used vi/vim and latex for many years (over 20). And this still impressed me a lot. Can’t wait to see how he does the figures.
- curiousgal 8y ago
  He's using inkscape. https://www.quora.com/Can-people-actually-keep-up-with-note-taking-in-Mathematics-lectures-with-LaTeX/answer/Gilles-Castel-1/comment/42822941 https://www.quora.com/Can-people-actually-keep-up-with-note-...
ascar 8y ago
Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 (the tab) had a feature in cooperation with WolframAlpha a few years back that translated your handwritten formula into a nice digital formula. It was like 90% there. Unfortunately fixing interpretation errors was a pain in the ass, which made it basically useless. I wonder if there was any meaningful improvement on this approach. Even just adding a nice UI to fix errors would've made it really useful.
jxy 8y ago
A template expander is indispensable for productivity. I have a perl script that expands text based on matching regular expressions. In this way I'm not tied to any particular editors: I wrap it in an AppleScript for a text service, and I wrap it in a shell script for working in Acme.
- mhd 8y ago
  Of course that doesn't get you niceties like jumping to different parts of the template and mirroring edits. But having it universally available might be worth the trade-offs. How do you invoke it in Acme? Tag item mouse-click for every expansion?
  - jxy 8y ago
    Just option click the script name. The script look at the current window body, RE match dot or RE match texts right before the dot. The first match executes the associated action. It's basically an extended version of plumber.
aportnoy 8y ago
Dropping a bombshell: https://github.com/brennier/quicktex https://github.com/brennier/quicktex
choeger 8y ago
Nice setup. Good explanation and seemingly gets the job done. Just one grievance: if you are concerned with parsing your latex (even if that's only possible while you restrict yourself), you should use the parentheses as math delimiters: `\( x + z\)`
emgee_1 8y ago
Very impressive. The first displayed text page contains a typo at the bottom : CHAUCHY iso CAUCHY. As others have said physically rewriting is part of comprehension (as is rewriting new words learned in a new language) As the lecture notes are drafts from the black board I suggest using a font that does not make it look like perfectly printed. You can fool yourself believing what you wrote because it looks so pretty. If you are writing a considerable amount of latex his setup is really cool. I will you these ideas but using emacs in stead of vim. Wonderful job!!
Adamantcheese 8y ago
So what I see here is a very impressive, hand built tab completion system for a specific task. Makes lots of things much faster. Now all you need to do is speed it up some more by using less keystrokes and a stenotype machine. But really the takeaway is the auto-completion. Incredibly useful.
erk__ 8y ago
I now use org-mode to do my notes it pretty much removes the need to write non math latex and when you have to write math you just inline the latex. And because I also write my assignments in the same file I can generate a nice latex file with everything I have written doing the course.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Org-mode is awesome, but the points about snippets still apply. AFAIR yasnippet should support most, if not all, capabilities presented in this article.
j7ake 8y ago
Beautiful notes! But I don't believe those figures are made using LaTeX and Vim... I can't see how you convert keyboard strokes to nice figures shown in the example.
- probably_wrong 8y ago
  I'm not following. What is it exactly that you don't believe? Those figures are exactly the type of figures one gets using LaTeX.
- mathblocks 8y ago
  From the original post: > There, I explained my workflow of taking lecture notes in LaTeX using Vim and how I draw figures in Inkscape. Looks like the author was using Inkscape earlier but may have switched to something else recently. You can draw impressively beautiful diagrams in LaTeX with TikZ although it can be a lot of work to do so with TikZ which would make it difficult for live note taking.
- phosphophyllite 8y ago
  Probably it's "compose key" feature available on linux, allowing one to type alternative characters via key mnemonics, rather than numeric key codes like on windows. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key
kkarakk 8y ago
i use onenote to import the pdf of the textbook and then annotate that. this process seems like someone who doesn't know what to use their programming skills for in order to over engineer a solution to a vaguely defined problem(take pretty notes using software) what is the point of recreating everything in the textbook again?
miki123211 8y ago
I use LaTeX for notetaking as a blind person because that's the only way to show my notes to sighted people. Nothing else comes even close. Ascimath would be much better and that's what I'd recommend for most people, unless you're required to send PDF documents and often offline.
- trombonechamp 8y ago
  Thanks for the ascimath reference. Do you know of any similar technologies for writing equations in a simpler and more readable form than latex? I've never seen ascimath before but I wish I had because I think I partially reinvented the wheel. I wrote some extensions to Pandoc (and an associated emacs major-mode) for scientific note-taking, with a main portion being a "simplified latex" for writing equations in a more readable way. The key features of simplified latex format are matlab-style matrices, UTF8 support, easy exponents, and better formatting (e.g. functions automatically use roman instead of italics). There are still a few edge cases mine doesn't catch, but I'm in the process of rewriting it in Haskell and rewrite is more stable. https://code.launchpad.net/~mwshinn/+junk/notes3 https://code.launchpad.net/~mwshinn/+junk/notes3 or for documentation: https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~mwshinn/+junk/notes3/view/head:/notes3.n https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~mwshinn/+junk/notes3/view/head...
  - cben 8y ago
    eqn (part of troff) from 1974, predating TeX, had a very decent syntax! It's not as complete as TeX, and the layout quality is worse, and I wouldn't want to touch the rest of troff syntax. So not really practical, but good inspiration. Open/LibreOffice math formulas use a syntax that's clearly inspired by it. Unfortunately it's very lacking in documentation. Another important question is are you looking for presentational or semantic math? For presentational fine tuning I'm afraid nothing can beat the flexibility of TeX combined with a huge body of Q&A (on stack exchange and elsewhere)...
wy35 8y ago
While this is certainly impressive, writing math formulas by hand commits them to memory way more effectively than typing latex commands/snippets. Although, an argument could be made that writing formulas in lecture is negligible compared to the amount of practice required outside of lecture for any mathematics course.
steventhedev 8y ago
Impressive! For anyone looking to do something similar, but in Sublime, I can recommend the LatexTools[0] plugin, which gives similar live previews of math mode. I'd never considered embedding figures from Inkscape though. I also decided that I wanted to keep lecture notes in LaTeX, and the best advice I have for anyone is to just practice. Start from LyX if it helps, but just make sure that you grind down the rough edges. It takes a long time, but like many skills that are worth learning, it takes lots of effort but the payoff is worth it. [0]: https://github.com/SublimeText/LaTeXTools https://github.com/SublimeText/LaTeXTools
- quietbritishjim 8y ago
  Start from LyX if it helps, but just make sure that you grind down the rough edges. Fully enough, I would have exactly the opposite recommendation: Start by writing LaTeX out manually, then move on to LyX when you have a good understanding. This is due to a combination of (1) needing to already know about LaTeX features before you can know to look for them in LyX (buried in menus or whatever) and (2) although LaTeX errors are much rarer when you're using LyX, when you do get them they're often really confusing ones. I'd say that using LyX requires greater knowledge of LaTeX than using LaTeX directly, just applied less often. The benefit of LyX is not that you avoid needing to know about LaTeX. It's that you don't have to see it when you're editing your content. Equations with a lot of subscripts and superscripts come to mind; anyone who claims that it is easier to find and fix mistakes in a nested superscript in the raw LaTeX rather than just clicking directly in rendered representation and fixing it in place is, frankly, lying, if only to themselves.
chicob 8y ago
This is really neat. But for me, if typing on a keyboard becomes just as functional as writing, I would still choose paper and pencil for two reasons: no power is required and it effortlessly autosaves.
neatcoder 8y ago
I have a similar but simpler setup. The crucial difference in my setup is that instead of using full blown LaTeX, I use TeXMe -- https://github.com/susam/texme https://github.com/susam/texme -- which supports Markdown and LaTeX. So I write plain text files with Markdown + LaTeX, slap a single line of TeXMe JavaScript either at the top or bottom, and open the file with browser to see the rendered math. Like the OP I use Vim too with some customization with :ino and :ab. Nothing beats the editing productivity and convenience of Vim!
setquk 8y ago
I don't agree with this. Perhaps it's possible for someone with exceptional LaTeX and vim knowledge, but even after using both for 20 years I wouldn't do this. The point of the lecture is to assimilate structure and basic understanding, not to produce a neat set of notes instantly. To take notes to this detail means you're putting more time into the note taking than the work. Use a pen and paper. Write down structure as it happens. Write down things you understand, short hand. Write down things you don't for later review. After 2 hour long linear circuits lectures I regularly waltzed off with a couple of pages of loose A4 for review. A lot of the time, our lecturers would give us a copy of the OHP stack if we asked them as well. Write your notes up at the end of the day with reference material at hand and no compromises. You can structure, extrapolate and transform things into your own understandable language then.
- Rainymood 8y ago
  >Write your notes up at the end of the day with reference material at hand and no compromises. You can structure, extrapolate and transform things into your own understandable language then. As if the average modern day student is going to do this. I did what OP did and it worked for me because instead of dozing off I was focused on keeping up with the lecturer. It worked for me personally. More on topic, the standard vim-latex bindings are so incredible, for example "`a" (backtick + a) expands to "alpha", "`b" (backtick + b) expands to beta, then we also have "`/" (backtick + slash) which expands to "\frac{<++>}{<++>}" where "<++>" are called bullet points that you can jump to using <C-j>. I too, was able to write LaTeX notes in class, it was awesome.
  - setquk 8y ago
    > As if the average modern day student is going to do this. This is the problem. Yes I dozed off in lectures too but only when I knew the material already (preparation - another modern day student failing!) or had a heavy night or a starchy breakfast. Like I said I'm fairly experienced with LaTeX. I've used it for technical documentation for 20 years. Picking an example, I did an EE degree. I sat there and watched a hundred students scribbling out a lecturer's slide with basic function laplace transforms in it. The lecturer moved on leaving 99 people with half a table of transforms. Me, I'm sitting there with <<laplace basic transform table>>. I took this home, reviewed notes and added a reference to my textbook which contained it, added a sticky note to the book page sticking out of the side. Then I spent some time playing with them and trying them out and building valuable real understanding. Now I've completely forgotten what you even use a laplace transform for 20 years later but I can find out in 10 minutes with that textbook and my notes which I still have in a concise manor.
ygra 8y ago
Interestingly he uses pretty much the same techniques that I relied on when typing lecture notes with Word: - Formula auto-buildup with automatic replacements of \stuff with Unicode keeps the mess of backslashes and braces more readable (and it also allowed me to immediately spot where I mistyped something) - I used snippet-like things for parts I had to type a few times, such as a formula that's revisited a handful of times alter. - Some things are simply easier to type in Word (with UnicodeMath) than LaTeX, such as a^12 being automatically what a^{12} is in LaTeX or fractions being written as a/b, thus requiring fewer braces. Also, as a user of a non-US keyboard layout back then, UnicodeMath's use of () instead of {} for invisible grouping and automatically resizing parentheses meant a lot less typing in general and less syntax to inadvertently break the layout. The only thing I could not do in real-time was figures where I often did a quick sketch on paper and in the evening converted that into a nice drawing. But text and math was (at least for me) easily writable in real-time and generally required no post-processing or prettification. Assigning certain styles to keyboard shortcuts was also something the author probably used snippets for, but the end result for the typing experience is pretty much the same. I did write notes by hand the preceding year, averaging about 7 pages of notes per lecture. Others have mentioned it too, the very act of writing notes helps remembering. For the handwritten notes I could just as well have bought the book by the professor, but I didn't do that on purpose. For me, there was no difference in being able to remember my notes between handwriting and typing. And generally I did spend most of the lecture writing and understanding came later when solving the assignments.
- mklingen 8y ago
  This is how I took notes in college as well. TeX people may scoff but word is way better for taking math notes quickly. Just learn the key combos and you can do almost anything rapidly. The only thing I found tedious was matrix/vector stuff.
kacamak 8y ago
Why would you torture yourself like this? In mathematics understanding is everything, and using the time to listen carefully and understand is more important than having perfect notes, handwritten notes are quite enough.
jacobmischka 8y ago
While I don't plan on doing this during lectures, I will be taking some of these tips to help when composing assignments and papers, thanks for posting!
bluenose69 8y ago
As a 30-year latex user and a 10-year newbie to vim, I am impressed by the author's skills, and will likely copy some of his macros. However, as someone who has taught mathematically-inclined material for those three decades, I cannot recommend using a computer to take notes in class, for I have simply never seen a student who found that effective. Although some students try to take notes on a computer during the first day of my classes, I have never seen one who tried to do that after the second or third lecture. The paper method (or, equivalently, using a stylus to hand-write on a screen) is simply better suited to the dynamic of a class. An effective class is not a linear presentation of material, a sort of recitation of a book by a professor. And effective notes are not transcriptions of the class material. An effective class weaves around through a topic, building on interactions with the students. This often involves departures from a simple path that, transcribed in real-time, would be footnotes within footnotes within footnotes, "Inception" style. And of course mathematical material tends to involve a lot of diagrams. Hand-written notes, with lots of arrows between ideas and boxes with sketches, are not just a good way of making a record of a class, but they are a great way of understanding what's going on in real time. The only place I could see this detailed note-taking method working would be in a class where the teacher essentially reproduced a book in class. But is that the kind of class that justifies the cost of tuition? I have two anecdotes I'd like to share. 1. A student came to me to ask a question about something that came up in class. I asked to see her notes, to get a clearer idea of what was confusing her. The notes were amazingly insightful and clear. I asked how she took those notes, which contained some things I had said and others I had not said. She replied "I don't write down what you say, I write down what I think you mean." This student will likely be a professor in a few years, and I envy the students who will take her classes. 2. Last term, I recommended that my students try the Cornell note-taking method. (See http://lsc.cornell.edu/notes.html http://lsc.cornell.edu/notes.html for an example, although there are many treatments of the method online, including videos.) The students who tried it seemed to enjoy it, and it may be no accident that the class leader was one of them.
securitybear 8y ago
Now that 'Escape' is not a real hardware key in the new Macbook Pro anymore and even otherwise 'Escape' has always been one of the hard to reach keys, what is workaround for avoiding the 'Escape' key in Vim?
- feiss 8y ago
  some people use Shift Lock (which is barely used, and closer to pinky), and a colleague of mine use the sequence 'ii'
  - securitybear 8y ago
    Did you mean Caps Lock? Which tool do you use? I found https://github.com/susam/uncap https://github.com/susam/uncap but it does not have a MacOS binary.
    - rodorgas 8y ago
      You don't need any external program. Open System Preferences, go to Keyboard and click on "Modifiers Keys...", then you can map Caps Lock to Esc.
- mthwsjc_ 8y ago
  people often map `jk` or `jj`, or the key to the left of `1` to Esc. I use `jk`.
  - foo101 8y ago
    I tried the idea of using `jk` in the past and found that it surely cannot be a perfect replacement of Escape. Say I perform these mappings: :noremap jk <Esc> :inoremap jk <Esc> Now granted, pressing `jk` in insert mode escapes me to normal mode. But many use cases that work with the Escape key do not work with `jk` anymore. For example, try: :ab hn Hacker News Now type `hn` in insert mode and press Escape, it would expand to `Hacker News` like it should. But then type `hn` in insert mode and press `jk`, it does not expand to `Hacker News`.
zwaps 8y ago
Something different, but I use this https://remarkable.com/ https://remarkable.com/ Think of a big Kindle, good battery, and really good writing experience (much like paper). I can note on pdfs, it has handwriting recognition, exports well and is otherwise a joy to use. I used to have a top of the line Samsung tablet before, and was never really happy with it for taking notes and reading.
- johnwalkr 8y ago
  That looks really nice, a bit expensive though.
- twoquestions 8y ago
  How does this compare to taking notes on a Surface or iPad, color aside? It looks really cool, but pricey for what it can do.
MichaelMoser123 8y ago
I use libre office writer, it has a very good math formula editor. (Unlike MS word that keeps crashing when you try to write a math formula)
aboutruby 8y ago
That's interesting, I don't use vim snippets but seems like there is a few of them (mainly snipMate/UltiSnips) https://vi.stackexchange.com/questions/7466/what-is-the-difference-between-the-vim-snippets-plugins https://vi.stackexchange.com/questions/7466/what-is-the-diff... And there is a community-maintained repository of snippets: https://github.com/honza/vim-snippets https://github.com/honza/vim-snippets
jimhefferon 8y ago
I want to ask about the converse of this article. I teach at a college. I make presentations using LaTeX. I like to imagine that one advantage is that students can suck them off the intranet and work from them. I want to ask if this is common. Do students not find that other people do it?
enriquto 8y ago
Beautiful tricks for writing efficiently in LaTeX. But I just hate to take notes during lectures. I prefer if the professor gives the printed notes and then you need just to add small annotations, if anything.
decasteve 8y ago
I took notes using emacs and LaTeX in similar fashion. But I started by doing all of my assignments with it until I became proficient enough. I can type much faster than I write. I didn’t use any Elisp to help — though I probably should have in retrospect. I did have some common LaTeX macros/commands. It was nice to have the notes to study from in the end. This helped most in doing assignments and is what I’d recommend to others. I would write by pencil and paper then type as LaTeX. This forced me to review my solutions and fix mistakes or improve them. I didn’t attempt to get too fancy with plots in real-time (I kept a notebook for those courses) but I did do graph theory and commutative diagrams (category theory) with tikz.
elagost 8y ago
This method is beautiful and incredibly complicated. Anyone who has enough determination to build up their tools like this and make them 100% ideal and customized for their situation deserves all the praise they get. If your use case is similar to the author's, perhaps consider taking your environment and leaning hard into customization. As he's proven, it's very much worth it. Seems like it would be much less useful to copy his configs rather than building your own organic system after years of use, though - which is what he did. I really like vim, personally, but I encourage my coworkers more familiar with Windows to use nano over vi (nobody wants to type that extra m, for some reason) because they're less likely to mess things up. Better off for them to learn their own way rather than being dumped in the middle of the vi desert with no way to exit.
- angleofrepose 8y ago
  > Seems like it would be much less useful to copy his configs rather than building your own organic system after years of use, though - which is what he did. This is a great point and one I've been thinking about more recently. Tools and/or setups like the one displayed in the post with this level of specificity or complexity seem like they would be almost useless packaged up as a standalone. Much more valuable would be the system on which this was built (vim and the collections of extensions he used, not saying this is anywhere near an idea workflow but as you know if you use vim - it is extensible in its own right). Or, rather than that system, to take inspiration in it and design tools with much more intentional flexibility to allow people to build their experience. I recently had a great conversation about how science educators might wish to have 3 brown 1 blue style animations or experiments, but such a programming tool would be much too difficult to teach to the educators. I think that is totally true, 3b1b generates his videos programmatically and while I believe some version of his tool is open source, he does not offer any support. But there is something to the idea of having one's own publishing tool and workflow to allow the exploration of ideas in whatever field it may be. For Science teachers, they ought to be able to play in a tool like 3b1b uses, but it can't be his exact one, it seems they'd need some well thought out foundation upon which to express their mental models of physics or geometry or whatever it is. 3b1b about page; first item is his modeling approach: https://www.3blue1brown.com/faq https://www.3blue1brown.com/faq 3b1b animation: https://github.com/3b1b/manim https://github.com/3b1b/manim
dangom 8y ago
1700 pages of notes would translate to 9 pages/working-day in a year. That's a lot of note taking. The blog post is wonderful and does show outstanding LaTeX and VIM practical knowledge, but I'd be skeptical that the average student could absorb so much content and still have time to bring it to such a polished final format every day. Nonetheless, there's definitely a lesson to be learned here with respect to the usage of templates. In essence it seems like OP developed his own shorthand language for both text and mathematics. I'm always curious to hear about approaches that try to solve the bandwidth problem (as we have quickscript [1] for hand-writing and stenography [2] for typing). Most interestingly, I'd be curious to know whether these short-hand notations are actually capable of improving learning and assimilation, and whether they'd work for a general audience. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quikscript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quikscript [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography
- akrout 8y ago
  Looks like you have a typo in your [2] link. I think you meant to link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenotype https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenotype
  - dangom 8y ago
    That is correct, thank you. Also in the description, I meant stenotype and not stenography.
Vaslo 8y ago
When I see a Math lecture written in LaTeX, I immediately know that I will probably be too dumb to follow it. It's almost always a deep exposition on what the writer want to show he/she knows or how many complicated formulas they can apply rather than really try to teach me something.
- dangom 8y ago
  Not necessarily true. If you take the score of e.g. Chopin's Ballade N.3 you'd be inclined to think sheet music is all just show off. Abstract notation takes time to parse and understand when you see it for the first time, no matter how well versed you are.
yubiox 8y ago
I really like this, but it would be very hard to learn all the macros. There were no real portable computers when I did undergrad. When I much later went to law school I transcribed about 90% of what the professors said on a latptop and then later went back though it to make outlines and then outlines of outlines. I took some premed classes after that but because of the drawings I had to handwrite the notes. I still transcribed as much as possible of what the professors said and later went back and outlined from it. I've never been able to learn from the textbook and if I ever missed a class I did poorly if tested on that material.
ska 8y ago
An alternate approach: Somewhere in the middle of my first math degree I basically stopped taking notes in lectures (maybe 1/2 page, or a few lines per lecture, just any "aha" moment, really). Best change I ever made. This way I could focus on the lecture itself - and as you can't learn this stuff without doing it my "real" notes were made later while doing exercises.
sus_007 8y ago
I'm surprised to see not enough mentions of Emacs's Orgmode which clearly dominates Vim when it comes to note-taking with or without Latex. Not to start another Vim vs Emacs war, I've been using both of them for quite some years now for each of their specialties. But when it comes to Notetaking, Orgmode is hands-down far superior with it's rich plugin ecosystem & minor modes within. Some plugins I use to do Latexy stuffs on Emacs is (ofc) Auctex, latex-preview-pane, PDFTools. Finally, OxHugo to export my Latexy org as a blog post to my Hugo blog.
- ShepherdKing 8y ago
  See https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode for Orgmode in Vim.
debbiedowner 8y ago
I used to do this too, but I took pics of the figures or drew on paper them instead. The only times you don't feel like the silliest student in the room when live texing is when you have one of those professors that edits each equation in place for 5 mins and quickly instead of rewriting the equations in edited form. There are some lectures where every week something truly unique happens that is not available in any one book in the whole world, AND you have to know it well for your area or bc of a hard test. But in all other cases, where the information can be found in some textbook or it is some well studied subject, my opinion is it's not worth it. Texing can turn into an escape from actually learning the stuff
andbberger 8y ago
I did this during college (but with emacs). It was fine. I was in the habit of TeXing up my homework anyway so was fairly practiced, and I have shit handwriting and know I'll never reference anything I write on paper, or have it to look at in a few years. I also don't get that much out of lectures. YMMV It's nice to have it to reference now though.
jshowa3 8y ago
I guess if you have high wpm, this might be feasible. I unfortunately don't, even after constant practice.
xurukefi 8y ago
Didn't believe that this is really possible. Certainly interesting to see what is possible with macros and workflow optimizations. However, why is this extensive note taking necessary? Shouldn't the course materials provide a digital copy of the script?
arminiusreturns 8y ago
Hi. From: Emacs org-mode users who export to latex/pdf.
spongepoc 8y ago
Oh look it's the daily 'look how inadequate you are for not doing this unnecessary leet thing' post.
billfruit 8y ago
Why don't universities just videotape the lectures as they are happening and make them available for reference to the students. Then the students can just pay full attention to listening the lecture while it is happening, then the students can use the tapes later to make notes later if required.
burtonator 8y ago
I have to make a plug for the project I'm working on as it seems like you guys are the target market: https://getpolarized.io/ https://getpolarized.io/ Polar allows students and researchers to keep all their research in one place, take notes, highlights, annotations, etc. You can tag your books and suspend resume reading without losing your place. It also supports sync with Anki which is rather nice. The one caveat is that I don't (yet) support math as well as I would like. Latex is supported by summernote but I haven't enabled the module yet. I usually wait for enough people to complain but math is definitely something I want to support.
EdwardCoffin 8y ago
I got a STEM degree in the early 1990s, and my usual note taking style was in the same vein: I used four colours of pen, a straightedge for lines, and tried to make nicely presentable notes that I would not have to make alterations to after the lecture. In retrospect I think this was completely insane. I was so preoccupied with the mundane details of layout and presentation that many of the important technical details the professors were talking about went right by me. I'm amazed I managed to get by with this style. One of the courses I did best in was one for which the blackboard presentation was drawn from the textbook, and in that one I did not bother with the elaborate note taking, just relied on the textbook. For some reason I never made the connection between me doing unusually well in that course and the fact that I wasn't distracted by note taking. If I were to do it all over again I would make my notes merely capture the information (and if I knew the information was in my text, just capture enough to identify where), and if I really wanted beautifully laid out notes I would rewrite them after class, with the added benefit that the rewriting would be an implicit review.
war1025 8y ago
I always found that my notes were effectively write-only. The process of writing things down on paper helped me absorb the information, but beyond that I never really looked back at the notes. Generally I could find the information I needed in a better form somewhere else. If anything, the notes mainly helped me review broadly which topics were covered on which days. For math specifically, I always found that what helped me most was to come up with a general "shape" of how I used the paper when solving a problem of a particular type. Then I would end up with a visual that helped me know which bits of information I was missing and what I needed to do where to find the answer. It's different from the "draw a picture" thing, really more of a knolling[1] of the problem down on paper. If all the things are in their places, then the answer to the problem is straight-forward to come up with. Edit: Mise en place [2] might also be a good way to describe it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Sachs_(artist)#Knolling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Sachs_(artist)#Knolling [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mise_en_place https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mise_en_place
Jerry2 8y ago
Anyone know what theme/font he's using?
ShepherdKing 8y ago
The real value I see here, is being able to write anything, such as a publication-quality scientific document - in Vim. I have yet to see a comprehensive overview of what this would entail in Vim. I think Orgmode [1] in Vim makes progress towards this. [1] https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode
ejz 8y ago
This is godly.

> which makes for a total of more than 1700 pages of notes That's an absolutely incredible feat, especially considering that the notes look pretty much textbook-quality! Although personally, I have never been able to both absorb a lecture and take electronic notes. If I need comprehension, my notes have always had to be pen-and-paper. Once again, this is an incredible feat.

_emacsomancer_ 8y ago
> If I need comprehension, my notes have always had to be pen-and-paper. I agree. However, if I want to be able to refer to them afterwards, I really need to take electronic notes.
- randomsearch 8y ago
  Agreed. So we have this problem that can only be resolved by taking notes with a pen before typing them up. This has the nice opportunity of reviewing them whilst typing, and puts pressure on you to ensure understanding when making notes.
  - jjeaff 8y ago
    Or use one of the many handwriting recognition apps and take pictures of the hand notes. You don't actually want to convert the handwriting to text, because there will be errors. But it should be good enough to create a search index.

nso95 8y ago

1700 pages? You've just rewritten the textbook. That doesn't seem like a good use of time.

directive 8y ago

This is pretty amazing. I regularly use LaTeX for typesetting homework at school but have never been able to keep up during lectures. I'll have to look into including this in my workflow.

codebook 8y ago

I've got the usefulness of Ultisnip in this article at least. I couldn't understand everything else... mathematics?

markkm 8y ago

Good ol' Live-TeXing. Googling "LiveTeXing" will show you other examples of this, if you are curious to see more. For those who aren't already familiar with Vim, Kile 3.0 beta is a fine substitute. It does most of what's described in the post in a GUI environment.

kinkrtyavimoodh 8y ago

As a feat in itself this is definitely very impressive, but I wonder if it's really worth anyone's time to spend precious lecture time with your mind fully occupied in the mechanical task of taking notes rather than actually absorbing and engaging with the content. Especially for an extremely content-dense subject like Mathematics, where you need all your concentration just to process what you are reading and follow along the logic. There is absolutely no dearth of study material on the internet. It's one thing to take notes as part of your study process. There it helps solidify your understanding. But surely taking notes on the fly when you have been barely introduced to the subject isn't going to help with that.

phoenixstrike 8y ago
Glad to see this at the top, agree 100%. I’m definitely going to copy some of OP’s setting and snippets, but not for real time use during a lecture. A textbook is an infinitely better reference than any notes one could take in class. Read the damn book. Lecture time should be for asking questions when you have a freaking live expert professor literally presenting the material to you. Ask all the small, nuanced questions that you can think of in the moment, which you can’t find answers to easily online or in the book. Not to downplay the efficient workflow here, but there is zero chance that this person’s notes are actually better than a real textbook.
- roel_v 8y ago
  That's fine amd dandy from a US perspective, but many European universities are different. I don't know about this guy's exact class, but some (many?) undergrad classes are 500 people in a lecture hall with the professor orating, no textbook, and the content on the exam is pretty much whatever was covered during the lectures. So accurate note taking is very important because those notes essentially are your textbook. Hence the small business of students assembling high quality lecture notes and selling them to people who have't been to class (much).
  - kinkrtyavimoodh 8y ago
    At that point smuggling an audio recorder to the class might lead a better reproduction of the material.

DantesKite 8y ago

That's quite remarkable that you were able to do so many things so effortless in real-time. And all the notes look so beautiful.

blastbeat 8y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19440652 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19440652

_emacsomancer_ 8y ago

Very cool & beautiful notes! I'm looking forward to seeing how the author live-TeX's figures - I'd love to get better at creating figures in TeX even in a slower, more offline context. Having to drop to Python in some cases seems non-ideal though. If only there were some editor with good, customisable scripting built-in.....

twiceaday 8y ago

I did the same thing when I was in uni. Couple of my profs asked for my notes so they can make class notes for next year. I also did all of my math assignments this way and it was so easy copying stuff from the notes and working with it without erasing and compromising on space. I could break down every algebraic step for maximum clarity.

jclay 8y ago

I used to do this, but I switched to just using a Jupyter Notebook. It’s nice to be able to move between multiple computers, with no need to set up a LaTeX install. A couple of things I love about this setup: I can write in Markdown and drop to LaTeX when I need to forumalate any equations. For homework, I can implement a quick Python script inline to build intuition behind a topic. I can use Sympy to simplify and solve for more complex derivations. This outputs LaTeX which I can paste into the requisite Markdown cell. With Plotly, I can quickly create a nice 2D or 3D visualization.

Cybiote 8y ago
Hi, what sort of complex derivations can you solve for with Sympy?
- mkl 8y ago
  Tons of different things: https://www.sympy.org/en/features.html https://www.sympy.org/en/features.html. Try it for yourself: https://live.sympy.org/ https://live.sympy.org/ E.g. find critical points on a surface: e = (x-y+2)*(x**2+y**2-9) solve([e.diff(x), e.diff(y)], [x, y]) Note that this online demo runs at a restricted speed; locally (e.g. install Anaconda and use Jupyter Notebook or QtConsole) it's much faster.

yaseer 8y ago

This is impressive. There is no way I would be able to take these notes, live, and learn the mathematics simultaneously. So this approach wouldn't be a good idea for me, and perhaps most people. But if you're able to do that, then it's doubly impressive.

redbumble 8y ago

Hey, for note taking using markdown and mathjax, I also like Typora (https://typora.io https://typora.io) a lot. Easy to install, wysiwym, works out-of-the-box!

mathblocks 8y ago
I do the same thing (markdown and mathjax) but I use TeXMe (https://github.com/susam/texme https://github.com/susam/texme). I like TeXMe a lot because it turns any Markdown and LaTeX notes into a self-rendering file. Just open your Markdown+LaTeX notes in any browser and it renders itself beautifully, almost looks like a paper. It is not wysiwyg though. But for me the convenience of distributing my Markdown+LaTeX source itself that can render in any browser without a separate compilation/processing step is a huge win! See https://github.com/susam/texme#get-started https://github.com/susam/texme#get-started if you are curious how it works.

semitext 8y ago

Neat. I'm a self-taught developer, and I learned a lot by watching MIT computer science lectures on youtube while taking notes in a markdown file. But I definitely hit a wall when I tried to follow the Mathematics for Computer Science course. I didn't have a good way to handle the notation. Ultimately though I think if I ever decide to follow through with that I'll probably just write in a notebook and scan the documents so I can easily reference them. But I love the dedication to figuring this out!

z3t4 8y ago

This reminds me of the sole draining * job as a "web developer" to turn word documents into HTML. I imagine such a job also exist in science, but instead of Word to HTML you turn paper notes into LaTeX. He could probably make good money helping professors write papers. * You coded since you where 15 years old, wrote your own game engine, wanted to cure cancer and save the world, and now your job is to copy text from one document to another.

krageon 8y ago
The best response to having to do dumb work like this is to automate it with regex, bash (and possibly an unzipping tool - aren't word documents zipped xml?) and take the time that people previously gave you to do the task to tweak your scripts and learn things you find interesting. I got through my dumbest student jobs that way, which was almost all of my student jobs.
- mkesper 8y ago
  Pandoc can bring you quite far here.
- z3t4 8y ago
  I got a friend that basically automated his job, the management was not pleased, and forced him to go back to doing it manually ... He managed to get another job. But figured out he wanted to work with actual software development, and it also seems to be a shortage of software developers. But it was virtually impossible to get a job without a degree or experience. So he's now at age 45 enrolling a five year university program to become an engineer on paper ...
  - creatornator 8y ago
    This is so unfortunate, but I'm not surprised. What kind of poor management, when met with an efficiency that could double an employee's output by automating their current job, limits it back to the 50% efficiency? I've met some managers like that...

zadwang 8y ago

The techniques in the article definitely are useful to improve efficiency of typing math. I have used vi/vim and latex for many years (over 20). And this still impressed me a lot. Can’t wait to see how he does the figures.

curiousgal 8y ago
He's using inkscape. https://www.quora.com/Can-people-actually-keep-up-with-note-taking-in-Mathematics-lectures-with-LaTeX/answer/Gilles-Castel-1/comment/42822941 https://www.quora.com/Can-people-actually-keep-up-with-note-...

ascar 8y ago

Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 (the tab) had a feature in cooperation with WolframAlpha a few years back that translated your handwritten formula into a nice digital formula. It was like 90% there. Unfortunately fixing interpretation errors was a pain in the ass, which made it basically useless. I wonder if there was any meaningful improvement on this approach. Even just adding a nice UI to fix errors would've made it really useful.

jxy 8y ago

A template expander is indispensable for productivity. I have a perl script that expands text based on matching regular expressions. In this way I'm not tied to any particular editors: I wrap it in an AppleScript for a text service, and I wrap it in a shell script for working in Acme.

mhd 8y ago
Of course that doesn't get you niceties like jumping to different parts of the template and mirroring edits. But having it universally available might be worth the trade-offs. How do you invoke it in Acme? Tag item mouse-click for every expansion?
- jxy 8y ago
  Just option click the script name. The script look at the current window body, RE match dot or RE match texts right before the dot. The first match executes the associated action. It's basically an extended version of plumber.

aportnoy 8y ago

Dropping a bombshell: https://github.com/brennier/quicktex https://github.com/brennier/quicktex

choeger 8y ago

Nice setup. Good explanation and seemingly gets the job done. Just one grievance: if you are concerned with parsing your latex (even if that's only possible while you restrict yourself), you should use the parentheses as math delimiters: `\( x + z\)`

emgee_1 8y ago

Very impressive. The first displayed text page contains a typo at the bottom : CHAUCHY iso CAUCHY. As others have said physically rewriting is part of comprehension (as is rewriting new words learned in a new language) As the lecture notes are drafts from the black board I suggest using a font that does not make it look like perfectly printed. You can fool yourself believing what you wrote because it looks so pretty. If you are writing a considerable amount of latex his setup is really cool. I will you these ideas but using emacs in stead of vim. Wonderful job!!

Adamantcheese 8y ago

So what I see here is a very impressive, hand built tab completion system for a specific task. Makes lots of things much faster. Now all you need to do is speed it up some more by using less keystrokes and a stenotype machine. But really the takeaway is the auto-completion. Incredibly useful.

erk__ 8y ago

I now use org-mode to do my notes it pretty much removes the need to write non math latex and when you have to write math you just inline the latex. And because I also write my assignments in the same file I can generate a nice latex file with everything I have written doing the course.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
Org-mode is awesome, but the points about snippets still apply. AFAIR yasnippet should support most, if not all, capabilities presented in this article.

j7ake 8y ago

Beautiful notes! But I don't believe those figures are made using LaTeX and Vim... I can't see how you convert keyboard strokes to nice figures shown in the example.

probably_wrong 8y ago
I'm not following. What is it exactly that you don't believe? Those figures are exactly the type of figures one gets using LaTeX.
mathblocks 8y ago
From the original post: > There, I explained my workflow of taking lecture notes in LaTeX using Vim and how I draw figures in Inkscape. Looks like the author was using Inkscape earlier but may have switched to something else recently. You can draw impressively beautiful diagrams in LaTeX with TikZ although it can be a lot of work to do so with TikZ which would make it difficult for live note taking.
phosphophyllite 8y ago
Probably it's "compose key" feature available on linux, allowing one to type alternative characters via key mnemonics, rather than numeric key codes like on windows. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key

kkarakk 8y ago

i use onenote to import the pdf of the textbook and then annotate that. this process seems like someone who doesn't know what to use their programming skills for in order to over engineer a solution to a vaguely defined problem(take pretty notes using software) what is the point of recreating everything in the textbook again?

miki123211 8y ago

I use LaTeX for notetaking as a blind person because that's the only way to show my notes to sighted people. Nothing else comes even close. Ascimath would be much better and that's what I'd recommend for most people, unless you're required to send PDF documents and often offline.

trombonechamp 8y ago
Thanks for the ascimath reference. Do you know of any similar technologies for writing equations in a simpler and more readable form than latex? I've never seen ascimath before but I wish I had because I think I partially reinvented the wheel. I wrote some extensions to Pandoc (and an associated emacs major-mode) for scientific note-taking, with a main portion being a "simplified latex" for writing equations in a more readable way. The key features of simplified latex format are matlab-style matrices, UTF8 support, easy exponents, and better formatting (e.g. functions automatically use roman instead of italics). There are still a few edge cases mine doesn't catch, but I'm in the process of rewriting it in Haskell and rewrite is more stable. https://code.launchpad.net/~mwshinn/+junk/notes3 https://code.launchpad.net/~mwshinn/+junk/notes3 or for documentation: https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~mwshinn/+junk/notes3/view/head:/notes3.n https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~mwshinn/+junk/notes3/view/head...
- cben 8y ago
  eqn (part of troff) from 1974, predating TeX, had a very decent syntax! It's not as complete as TeX, and the layout quality is worse, and I wouldn't want to touch the rest of troff syntax. So not really practical, but good inspiration. Open/LibreOffice math formulas use a syntax that's clearly inspired by it. Unfortunately it's very lacking in documentation. Another important question is are you looking for presentational or semantic math? For presentational fine tuning I'm afraid nothing can beat the flexibility of TeX combined with a huge body of Q&A (on stack exchange and elsewhere)...

wy35 8y ago

While this is certainly impressive, writing math formulas by hand commits them to memory way more effectively than typing latex commands/snippets. Although, an argument could be made that writing formulas in lecture is negligible compared to the amount of practice required outside of lecture for any mathematics course.

steventhedev 8y ago

Impressive! For anyone looking to do something similar, but in Sublime, I can recommend the LatexTools[0] plugin, which gives similar live previews of math mode. I'd never considered embedding figures from Inkscape though. I also decided that I wanted to keep lecture notes in LaTeX, and the best advice I have for anyone is to just practice. Start from LyX if it helps, but just make sure that you grind down the rough edges. It takes a long time, but like many skills that are worth learning, it takes lots of effort but the payoff is worth it. [0]: https://github.com/SublimeText/LaTeXTools https://github.com/SublimeText/LaTeXTools

quietbritishjim 8y ago
Start from LyX if it helps, but just make sure that you grind down the rough edges. Fully enough, I would have exactly the opposite recommendation: Start by writing LaTeX out manually, then move on to LyX when you have a good understanding. This is due to a combination of (1) needing to already know about LaTeX features before you can know to look for them in LyX (buried in menus or whatever) and (2) although LaTeX errors are much rarer when you're using LyX, when you do get them they're often really confusing ones. I'd say that using LyX requires greater knowledge of LaTeX than using LaTeX directly, just applied less often. The benefit of LyX is not that you avoid needing to know about LaTeX. It's that you don't have to see it when you're editing your content. Equations with a lot of subscripts and superscripts come to mind; anyone who claims that it is easier to find and fix mistakes in a nested superscript in the raw LaTeX rather than just clicking directly in rendered representation and fixing it in place is, frankly, lying, if only to themselves.

chicob 8y ago

This is really neat. But for me, if typing on a keyboard becomes just as functional as writing, I would still choose paper and pencil for two reasons: no power is required and it effortlessly autosaves.

neatcoder 8y ago

I have a similar but simpler setup. The crucial difference in my setup is that instead of using full blown LaTeX, I use TeXMe -- https://github.com/susam/texme https://github.com/susam/texme -- which supports Markdown and LaTeX. So I write plain text files with Markdown + LaTeX, slap a single line of TeXMe JavaScript either at the top or bottom, and open the file with browser to see the rendered math. Like the OP I use Vim too with some customization with :ino and :ab. Nothing beats the editing productivity and convenience of Vim!

setquk 8y ago

I don't agree with this. Perhaps it's possible for someone with exceptional LaTeX and vim knowledge, but even after using both for 20 years I wouldn't do this. The point of the lecture is to assimilate structure and basic understanding, not to produce a neat set of notes instantly. To take notes to this detail means you're putting more time into the note taking than the work. Use a pen and paper. Write down structure as it happens. Write down things you understand, short hand. Write down things you don't for later review. After 2 hour long linear circuits lectures I regularly waltzed off with a couple of pages of loose A4 for review. A lot of the time, our lecturers would give us a copy of the OHP stack if we asked them as well. Write your notes up at the end of the day with reference material at hand and no compromises. You can structure, extrapolate and transform things into your own understandable language then.

Rainymood 8y ago
>Write your notes up at the end of the day with reference material at hand and no compromises. You can structure, extrapolate and transform things into your own understandable language then. As if the average modern day student is going to do this. I did what OP did and it worked for me because instead of dozing off I was focused on keeping up with the lecturer. It worked for me personally. More on topic, the standard vim-latex bindings are so incredible, for example "`a" (backtick + a) expands to "alpha", "`b" (backtick + b) expands to beta, then we also have "`/" (backtick + slash) which expands to "\frac{<++>}{<++>}" where "<++>" are called bullet points that you can jump to using <C-j>. I too, was able to write LaTeX notes in class, it was awesome.
- setquk 8y ago
  > As if the average modern day student is going to do this. This is the problem. Yes I dozed off in lectures too but only when I knew the material already (preparation - another modern day student failing!) or had a heavy night or a starchy breakfast. Like I said I'm fairly experienced with LaTeX. I've used it for technical documentation for 20 years. Picking an example, I did an EE degree. I sat there and watched a hundred students scribbling out a lecturer's slide with basic function laplace transforms in it. The lecturer moved on leaving 99 people with half a table of transforms. Me, I'm sitting there with <<laplace basic transform table>>. I took this home, reviewed notes and added a reference to my textbook which contained it, added a sticky note to the book page sticking out of the side. Then I spent some time playing with them and trying them out and building valuable real understanding. Now I've completely forgotten what you even use a laplace transform for 20 years later but I can find out in 10 minutes with that textbook and my notes which I still have in a concise manor.

ygra 8y ago

Interestingly he uses pretty much the same techniques that I relied on when typing lecture notes with Word: - Formula auto-buildup with automatic replacements of \stuff with Unicode keeps the mess of backslashes and braces more readable (and it also allowed me to immediately spot where I mistyped something) - I used snippet-like things for parts I had to type a few times, such as a formula that's revisited a handful of times alter. - Some things are simply easier to type in Word (with UnicodeMath) than LaTeX, such as a^12 being automatically what a^{12} is in LaTeX or fractions being written as a/b, thus requiring fewer braces. Also, as a user of a non-US keyboard layout back then, UnicodeMath's use of () instead of {} for invisible grouping and automatically resizing parentheses meant a lot less typing in general and less syntax to inadvertently break the layout. The only thing I could not do in real-time was figures where I often did a quick sketch on paper and in the evening converted that into a nice drawing. But text and math was (at least for me) easily writable in real-time and generally required no post-processing or prettification. Assigning certain styles to keyboard shortcuts was also something the author probably used snippets for, but the end result for the typing experience is pretty much the same. I did write notes by hand the preceding year, averaging about 7 pages of notes per lecture. Others have mentioned it too, the very act of writing notes helps remembering. For the handwritten notes I could just as well have bought the book by the professor, but I didn't do that on purpose. For me, there was no difference in being able to remember my notes between handwriting and typing. And generally I did spend most of the lecture writing and understanding came later when solving the assignments.

mklingen 8y ago
This is how I took notes in college as well. TeX people may scoff but word is way better for taking math notes quickly. Just learn the key combos and you can do almost anything rapidly. The only thing I found tedious was matrix/vector stuff.

kacamak 8y ago

Why would you torture yourself like this? In mathematics understanding is everything, and using the time to listen carefully and understand is more important than having perfect notes, handwritten notes are quite enough.

jacobmischka 8y ago

While I don't plan on doing this during lectures, I will be taking some of these tips to help when composing assignments and papers, thanks for posting!

bluenose69 8y ago

As a 30-year latex user and a 10-year newbie to vim, I am impressed by the author's skills, and will likely copy some of his macros. However, as someone who has taught mathematically-inclined material for those three decades, I cannot recommend using a computer to take notes in class, for I have simply never seen a student who found that effective. Although some students try to take notes on a computer during the first day of my classes, I have never seen one who tried to do that after the second or third lecture. The paper method (or, equivalently, using a stylus to hand-write on a screen) is simply better suited to the dynamic of a class. An effective class is not a linear presentation of material, a sort of recitation of a book by a professor. And effective notes are not transcriptions of the class material. An effective class weaves around through a topic, building on interactions with the students. This often involves departures from a simple path that, transcribed in real-time, would be footnotes within footnotes within footnotes, "Inception" style. And of course mathematical material tends to involve a lot of diagrams. Hand-written notes, with lots of arrows between ideas and boxes with sketches, are not just a good way of making a record of a class, but they are a great way of understanding what's going on in real time. The only place I could see this detailed note-taking method working would be in a class where the teacher essentially reproduced a book in class. But is that the kind of class that justifies the cost of tuition? I have two anecdotes I'd like to share. 1. A student came to me to ask a question about something that came up in class. I asked to see her notes, to get a clearer idea of what was confusing her. The notes were amazingly insightful and clear. I asked how she took those notes, which contained some things I had said and others I had not said. She replied "I don't write down what you say, I write down what I think you mean." This student will likely be a professor in a few years, and I envy the students who will take her classes. 2. Last term, I recommended that my students try the Cornell note-taking method. (See http://lsc.cornell.edu/notes.html http://lsc.cornell.edu/notes.html for an example, although there are many treatments of the method online, including videos.) The students who tried it seemed to enjoy it, and it may be no accident that the class leader was one of them.

securitybear 8y ago

Now that 'Escape' is not a real hardware key in the new Macbook Pro anymore and even otherwise 'Escape' has always been one of the hard to reach keys, what is workaround for avoiding the 'Escape' key in Vim?

feiss 8y ago
some people use Shift Lock (which is barely used, and closer to pinky), and a colleague of mine use the sequence 'ii'
- securitybear 8y ago
  Did you mean Caps Lock? Which tool do you use? I found https://github.com/susam/uncap https://github.com/susam/uncap but it does not have a MacOS binary.
  - rodorgas 8y ago
    You don't need any external program. Open System Preferences, go to Keyboard and click on "Modifiers Keys...", then you can map Caps Lock to Esc.
mthwsjc_ 8y ago
people often map `jk` or `jj`, or the key to the left of `1` to Esc. I use `jk`.
- foo101 8y ago
  I tried the idea of using `jk` in the past and found that it surely cannot be a perfect replacement of Escape. Say I perform these mappings: :noremap jk <Esc> :inoremap jk <Esc> Now granted, pressing `jk` in insert mode escapes me to normal mode. But many use cases that work with the Escape key do not work with `jk` anymore. For example, try: :ab hn Hacker News Now type `hn` in insert mode and press Escape, it would expand to `Hacker News` like it should. But then type `hn` in insert mode and press `jk`, it does not expand to `Hacker News`.

zwaps 8y ago

Something different, but I use this https://remarkable.com/ https://remarkable.com/ Think of a big Kindle, good battery, and really good writing experience (much like paper). I can note on pdfs, it has handwriting recognition, exports well and is otherwise a joy to use. I used to have a top of the line Samsung tablet before, and was never really happy with it for taking notes and reading.

johnwalkr 8y ago
That looks really nice, a bit expensive though.
twoquestions 8y ago
How does this compare to taking notes on a Surface or iPad, color aside? It looks really cool, but pricey for what it can do.

MichaelMoser123 8y ago

I use libre office writer, it has a very good math formula editor. (Unlike MS word that keeps crashing when you try to write a math formula)

aboutruby 8y ago

That's interesting, I don't use vim snippets but seems like there is a few of them (mainly snipMate/UltiSnips) https://vi.stackexchange.com/questions/7466/what-is-the-difference-between-the-vim-snippets-plugins https://vi.stackexchange.com/questions/7466/what-is-the-diff... And there is a community-maintained repository of snippets: https://github.com/honza/vim-snippets https://github.com/honza/vim-snippets

jimhefferon 8y ago

I want to ask about the converse of this article. I teach at a college. I make presentations using LaTeX. I like to imagine that one advantage is that students can suck them off the intranet and work from them. I want to ask if this is common. Do students not find that other people do it?

enriquto 8y ago

Beautiful tricks for writing efficiently in LaTeX. But I just hate to take notes during lectures. I prefer if the professor gives the printed notes and then you need just to add small annotations, if anything.

decasteve 8y ago

I took notes using emacs and LaTeX in similar fashion. But I started by doing all of my assignments with it until I became proficient enough. I can type much faster than I write. I didn’t use any Elisp to help — though I probably should have in retrospect. I did have some common LaTeX macros/commands. It was nice to have the notes to study from in the end. This helped most in doing assignments and is what I’d recommend to others. I would write by pencil and paper then type as LaTeX. This forced me to review my solutions and fix mistakes or improve them. I didn’t attempt to get too fancy with plots in real-time (I kept a notebook for those courses) but I did do graph theory and commutative diagrams (category theory) with tikz.

elagost 8y ago

This method is beautiful and incredibly complicated. Anyone who has enough determination to build up their tools like this and make them 100% ideal and customized for their situation deserves all the praise they get. If your use case is similar to the author's, perhaps consider taking your environment and leaning hard into customization. As he's proven, it's very much worth it. Seems like it would be much less useful to copy his configs rather than building your own organic system after years of use, though - which is what he did. I really like vim, personally, but I encourage my coworkers more familiar with Windows to use nano over vi (nobody wants to type that extra m, for some reason) because they're less likely to mess things up. Better off for them to learn their own way rather than being dumped in the middle of the vi desert with no way to exit.

angleofrepose 8y ago
> Seems like it would be much less useful to copy his configs rather than building your own organic system after years of use, though - which is what he did. This is a great point and one I've been thinking about more recently. Tools and/or setups like the one displayed in the post with this level of specificity or complexity seem like they would be almost useless packaged up as a standalone. Much more valuable would be the system on which this was built (vim and the collections of extensions he used, not saying this is anywhere near an idea workflow but as you know if you use vim - it is extensible in its own right). Or, rather than that system, to take inspiration in it and design tools with much more intentional flexibility to allow people to build their experience. I recently had a great conversation about how science educators might wish to have 3 brown 1 blue style animations or experiments, but such a programming tool would be much too difficult to teach to the educators. I think that is totally true, 3b1b generates his videos programmatically and while I believe some version of his tool is open source, he does not offer any support. But there is something to the idea of having one's own publishing tool and workflow to allow the exploration of ideas in whatever field it may be. For Science teachers, they ought to be able to play in a tool like 3b1b uses, but it can't be his exact one, it seems they'd need some well thought out foundation upon which to express their mental models of physics or geometry or whatever it is. 3b1b about page; first item is his modeling approach: https://www.3blue1brown.com/faq https://www.3blue1brown.com/faq 3b1b animation: https://github.com/3b1b/manim https://github.com/3b1b/manim

dangom 8y ago

1700 pages of notes would translate to 9 pages/working-day in a year. That's a lot of note taking. The blog post is wonderful and does show outstanding LaTeX and VIM practical knowledge, but I'd be skeptical that the average student could absorb so much content and still have time to bring it to such a polished final format every day. Nonetheless, there's definitely a lesson to be learned here with respect to the usage of templates. In essence it seems like OP developed his own shorthand language for both text and mathematics. I'm always curious to hear about approaches that try to solve the bandwidth problem (as we have quickscript [1] for hand-writing and stenography [2] for typing). Most interestingly, I'd be curious to know whether these short-hand notations are actually capable of improving learning and assimilation, and whether they'd work for a general audience. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quikscript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quikscript [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography

akrout 8y ago
Looks like you have a typo in your [2] link. I think you meant to link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenotype https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenotype
- dangom 8y ago
  That is correct, thank you. Also in the description, I meant stenotype and not stenography.

Vaslo 8y ago

When I see a Math lecture written in LaTeX, I immediately know that I will probably be too dumb to follow it. It's almost always a deep exposition on what the writer want to show he/she knows or how many complicated formulas they can apply rather than really try to teach me something.

dangom 8y ago
Not necessarily true. If you take the score of e.g. Chopin's Ballade N.3 you'd be inclined to think sheet music is all just show off. Abstract notation takes time to parse and understand when you see it for the first time, no matter how well versed you are.

yubiox 8y ago

I really like this, but it would be very hard to learn all the macros. There were no real portable computers when I did undergrad. When I much later went to law school I transcribed about 90% of what the professors said on a latptop and then later went back though it to make outlines and then outlines of outlines. I took some premed classes after that but because of the drawings I had to handwrite the notes. I still transcribed as much as possible of what the professors said and later went back and outlined from it. I've never been able to learn from the textbook and if I ever missed a class I did poorly if tested on that material.

ska 8y ago

An alternate approach: Somewhere in the middle of my first math degree I basically stopped taking notes in lectures (maybe 1/2 page, or a few lines per lecture, just any "aha" moment, really). Best change I ever made. This way I could focus on the lecture itself - and as you can't learn this stuff without doing it my "real" notes were made later while doing exercises.

sus_007 8y ago

I'm surprised to see not enough mentions of Emacs's Orgmode which clearly dominates Vim when it comes to note-taking with or without Latex. Not to start another Vim vs Emacs war, I've been using both of them for quite some years now for each of their specialties. But when it comes to Notetaking, Orgmode is hands-down far superior with it's rich plugin ecosystem & minor modes within. Some plugins I use to do Latexy stuffs on Emacs is (ofc) Auctex, latex-preview-pane, PDFTools. Finally, OxHugo to export my Latexy org as a blog post to my Hugo blog.

ShepherdKing 8y ago
See https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode for Orgmode in Vim.

debbiedowner 8y ago

I used to do this too, but I took pics of the figures or drew on paper them instead. The only times you don't feel like the silliest student in the room when live texing is when you have one of those professors that edits each equation in place for 5 mins and quickly instead of rewriting the equations in edited form. There are some lectures where every week something truly unique happens that is not available in any one book in the whole world, AND you have to know it well for your area or bc of a hard test. But in all other cases, where the information can be found in some textbook or it is some well studied subject, my opinion is it's not worth it. Texing can turn into an escape from actually learning the stuff

andbberger 8y ago

I did this during college (but with emacs). It was fine. I was in the habit of TeXing up my homework anyway so was fairly practiced, and I have shit handwriting and know I'll never reference anything I write on paper, or have it to look at in a few years. I also don't get that much out of lectures. YMMV It's nice to have it to reference now though.

jshowa3 8y ago

I guess if you have high wpm, this might be feasible. I unfortunately don't, even after constant practice.

xurukefi 8y ago

Didn't believe that this is really possible. Certainly interesting to see what is possible with macros and workflow optimizations. However, why is this extensive note taking necessary? Shouldn't the course materials provide a digital copy of the script?

arminiusreturns 8y ago

Hi. From: Emacs org-mode users who export to latex/pdf.

spongepoc 8y ago

Oh look it's the daily 'look how inadequate you are for not doing this unnecessary leet thing' post.

billfruit 8y ago

Why don't universities just videotape the lectures as they are happening and make them available for reference to the students. Then the students can just pay full attention to listening the lecture while it is happening, then the students can use the tapes later to make notes later if required.

burtonator 8y ago

I have to make a plug for the project I'm working on as it seems like you guys are the target market: https://getpolarized.io/ https://getpolarized.io/ Polar allows students and researchers to keep all their research in one place, take notes, highlights, annotations, etc. You can tag your books and suspend resume reading without losing your place. It also supports sync with Anki which is rather nice. The one caveat is that I don't (yet) support math as well as I would like. Latex is supported by summernote but I haven't enabled the module yet. I usually wait for enough people to complain but math is definitely something I want to support.

EdwardCoffin 8y ago

I got a STEM degree in the early 1990s, and my usual note taking style was in the same vein: I used four colours of pen, a straightedge for lines, and tried to make nicely presentable notes that I would not have to make alterations to after the lecture. In retrospect I think this was completely insane. I was so preoccupied with the mundane details of layout and presentation that many of the important technical details the professors were talking about went right by me. I'm amazed I managed to get by with this style. One of the courses I did best in was one for which the blackboard presentation was drawn from the textbook, and in that one I did not bother with the elaborate note taking, just relied on the textbook. For some reason I never made the connection between me doing unusually well in that course and the fact that I wasn't distracted by note taking. If I were to do it all over again I would make my notes merely capture the information (and if I knew the information was in my text, just capture enough to identify where), and if I really wanted beautifully laid out notes I would rewrite them after class, with the added benefit that the rewriting would be an implicit review.

war1025 8y ago

I always found that my notes were effectively write-only. The process of writing things down on paper helped me absorb the information, but beyond that I never really looked back at the notes. Generally I could find the information I needed in a better form somewhere else. If anything, the notes mainly helped me review broadly which topics were covered on which days. For math specifically, I always found that what helped me most was to come up with a general "shape" of how I used the paper when solving a problem of a particular type. Then I would end up with a visual that helped me know which bits of information I was missing and what I needed to do where to find the answer. It's different from the "draw a picture" thing, really more of a knolling[1] of the problem down on paper. If all the things are in their places, then the answer to the problem is straight-forward to come up with. Edit: Mise en place [2] might also be a good way to describe it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Sachs_(artist)#Knolling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Sachs_(artist)#Knolling [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mise_en_place https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mise_en_place

Jerry2 8y ago

Anyone know what theme/font he's using?

ShepherdKing 8y ago

The real value I see here, is being able to write anything, such as a publication-quality scientific document - in Vim. I have yet to see a comprehensive overview of what this would entail in Vim. I think Orgmode [1] in Vim makes progress towards this. [1] https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode https://github.com/jceb/vim-orgmode

ejz 8y ago

This is godly.