How I take notes as a Math major using Vim + LaTeX

[NickKravitz]

I was a math major in the pre-internet era (90s). At that time math professors resisted the migration of chalk to whiteboards. Zero laptops in class. 90% of math majors become software developers or data scientists. Great video.

[nickp]

I just want to tell everyone that Gilles Castel, the incredible person that popularized this form of math note taking, has passed away. It's awesome to see that people still use his blog and keep his legacy alive. We lost him at a very young age. Thank you for this video.

[samuelsherriff]

I have no idea how i ended up here and have no intention of doing anything like this but I’ve watched the whole video! Your enthusiasm is super contagious!

[IchbinderJesus]

It's great to find someone with a more advanced guides to Latex. This is somewhat beyond my level, so it went by a little too fast, but hey, you were nervous. I hope you'll post more Latex stuff in the future. Maybe some more dedicated guides. Anyway, have a good one!

[katarixy]

This is pretty cool. As a challenge I remember I was crazy enough to force myself to learn TIKZ in LaTeX by writing all my notes in combinatorics. All those graphs.... still give me nightmares. Though I am really proficient on everything now. I love that I did all my homework and notes in LaTeX and now I can look back on it. My teacher once said "grading your homework is nice, because even when you make a mistake, I feel compelled to be more generous because it looks too good" lol

[antonbogun]

I highly recommend looking at TreeSheets. I'm a CS major and I've found it to be absolutely brilliant for writing notes for any subject. It's a recursive spreadsheet so you aren't limited by the linear nature of normal text files, and also allows easy image embedding, so anything I can't write (it doesn't support latex unfortunately) I can just screenshot and paste. It's also open source and _should_ be able to run anywhere (given enough pull requests).
What I have recently started doing is making lookup tables (e.g. page numbers and description of what's there) for important info in the book/slides of courses, meaning I do not have to rewrite literally everything, but it allows to avoid having to search through almost the entire material every time I want to look back at something.

[Riverbed_Dreaming]

Taking notes with vim and latex sounds like a torture method but this actually looks neat. We get paper notes with gaps in our lectures so I probably don’t need to find a better way to write in-class notes but this looks like it could seriously speed up my after-class boildown which could be really helpful. I’ve never used vim though so that’s probably something to tackle over the summer while I’m not drowning in work.

[khoda]

This is one of the most useful productivity focused guides that I'v ever seen. Thank you so much!

[AshkanKiani]

I did this when I was taking Linear Algebra in 2010ish, but I found it hard to actually absorb stuff because I was spending too much time focusing on taking notes and not listening in class as much. I wouldn't recommend doing this during an actual lecture, and instead maybe just record the thing and try to absorb the material first, then do notes afterwards.

And if you want to go further, you should pre-read the chapters you're expected to cover first. Even if you only understand 10% of it, that's still a 10% lead you have on being able to put the pieces together during a lecture.

[davidmorley]

This is awesome, I did most of my math problem sets in LaTex with vscode, but this formatting is way more beautiful than anything I came up with and all the shortcuts are great! Super impressed with this!

[thatonemailbox]

Saw this video a year ago when it came out, and it's the reason why I'm now 1) mainly using Neovim and can't do anything without Vim Keybindings and 2) got an early introduction to LaTeX in my career. Thank you for posting this, literally changed my life!

[dylanhall]

Thought this guy was weird and extra for taking notes through vim, then I read “Rice university”. Dude is way smarter than me

[squidwardstesticles]

That latex decompiler thing that gives you latex code from an image blew my mind, that’s so cool

[grasstoucher]

This is respectable effort and amazing skills. I personally am using OneNote with in built equation editor and I can imagine and also appreciate the learning curve you've been through to master this.

[MagufoBoy]

For journals in Mathematics and Theoretical Physics LaTeX is mandatory, if you get used to write everything in LaTeX from the start it will help you in the future.

[nothingiseverperfect]

This is super cool and aesthetic, love the power usage of the computer you make MACOSX look fun to use! Definitely gotta find out how you customized your Firefox like that!

[Derrekito]

You might like to be aware of org-mode in Emacs. You can produce identical documents with the added benefit of being able to easily read the text only document. To give you an example of how powerful it can be: I'm writing an IEEE style conference paper in org-mode. The raw text is a simple outline for which the hierarchy corresponds to a section, subsection, etc. I then just tell org-mode to export to pdf and it provides a publishable document and a fully tangled .tex file too.

[DisguisedKoala]

I’ve not dont this insane level of digital note taking, but I have written some simple Java scripts which open a JavaFX GUI window which contains a few text areas. You paste some text in, and press a button, and it automatically reformats the text into my personal Latex style, copies the new text, and clears the text bar. I can then paste the formatted text into my latex file.
I mostly used this to reformat matrices into my custom matrix commands that were much more organised and easier to edit.

If you were to add this to your workflow, you’d for example have the text ‘Problem 1. Do this and that.’ be automatically replaced by ‘\qs{}{1.}\\ do this and that’. (i know thats not exactly how you’d format it, but hopefully I’ve explained my idea)

Honestly, just tell me if you want the Java code and how to set it up, although it’s not very difficult to implement once if you understand JavaFX and string formatting. Of course other languages can also do this.

[WhenIHitMPH]

Vim and Emacs are so extensible that I think they are great tools for writing LaTeX quickly. I write my notes in Markdown, and use LaTeX to interpret my math equations embedded in the markdown. Pandoc is by far one of the most useful tools I've discovered since moving to Linux.

[ianbridges]

I usually take rough notes during lectures using markdown which I then convert to latex using pandoc and compile (done from hotkeys on my keyboard). Works great for me but I may give this a shot.