Gilles Castel, a mathematics PhD student, writes about taking lecture notes in LaTeX with Vim and Inkscape.
HN calls his LaTeX and Vim note-taking setup famous, and one commenter praises his notes as a pleasure to browse, made with a spartan design taste.
> I found Orgmode was amazing for writing LaTeX documents - but I wasn't working with other people.
This is probably the best way to type notes (and diagrams!) in class. It also works awesome for pretty much everything else in life too, when it comes to taking notes, especially for STEM work. I hope this helps! :-)
* How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim: https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-1/
* GitHub repo for above: https://github.com/gillescastel/latex-snippets
* How I draw figures for my mathematical lecture notes using Inkscape: https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-2/
* GitHub repo for above: https://github.com/gillescastel/inkscape-figures
* How I manage my LaTeX lecture notes: https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-3/
* GitHub repo for above: https://github.com/gillescastel/university-setup
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:
https://castel.dev/notes
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)
I am unable to reply to any comments, so I’ll add my reply to blagie as a top-level comment instead: Gilles himself documents his process of using Inkscape here: https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-2/
As a summary, he uses a custom keyboard shortcut manager¹ which allows him to compos multiple keystrokes (and also saves commonly used styles):
> For example, when I press `s` and `f` simultaneously, my shortcut manager will apply a solid stroke and a grey fill to the current selection. When I want the stroke to be thick, I press `s+f+g` together, where `g` stands for thick (as the `t` key is hard to reach).
[1]: he makes it available on GitHub: https://github.com/gillescastel/inkscape-shortcut-manager
A couple of things that might be of interest:
1) pandoc is awesome.
2) There are integrated development environments that allow you to write in markdown and output to pdf, html, and word with the flick of a switch. Rstudio with knitr, bookdown, and markdown has some nice functionality. Plus you can do graphs and drawings and embed them in the the rmd (r markdown) text.
3) There is an earlier post in HN from Gilles Castel on how to speedily write text through the ultisnips package. Very much a game changer on how I use vim to work with anything text related.
https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-1/
Nice post!
Both texmacs and lyx are excellent products, especially in the seamless integration of images and diagrams. More traditionally, Vim and Emacs can be used with snippets and vimtex/auctex quite efficiently, both for interactive note-taking and to prepare large documents. Gilles Castel has an excellent guide on the Vim side [0], and I cannot help mentioning my system [1] which I think produces pretty clear latex code.
[0] https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-1/
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/jtjol5/cinnamon_latex_workflow_in_vim/
According to the comments in the most recent post on this blog the author has passed away: https://castel.dev/post/research-workflow/
I stumbled on this blog recently when researching the same topic (nvim +latex). I found this more recent blog (https://www.ejmastnak.com/tutorials/vim-latex/intro/), by another author, inspired by this original author useful as well.
I found this blog post to be very helpful and the author was obviously a very good writer and I am sure he will be missed. Condolences to his friends and family.