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.
> mechanical task of taking notes rather than actually absorbing and engaging with the content
The mechanical task of taking notes is one of the most important parts of actually absorbing the material. It is not an either-or. Hearing/seeing the information, processing it in a way that makes sense to you individually, and then mechanically writing it down in a legible manner is one of the main methods that your brain learns. It's one of the primary reasons that taking notes is important in the first place. This is referred to as the "encoding hypothesis" [1].
There are actually even studies [2] that show that tools that assist in more efficient note taking, such as taking notes via typing rather than by hand, are actually detrimental to absorbing information, as it makes it easier for you to effectively pass the information directly from your ears to your computer without actually doing the processing that is required when writing notes by hand. This is why many universities prefer (or even require) notes to be taken by hand, and disallow laptops in class.
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.
Not everybody learns in the same way. For myself, I get essentially nothing out of just sitting in a lecture hall listening to a professor drone on. It literally just goes in one ear and out the other. The only way I am able to learn is by reading and by working through the material on my own, either from notes taken in class or (preferably) a textbook.
So I can appreciate what OP has done here. I took notes in LaTeX for most of my undergraduate math courses (and some graduate ones), and I found it to be a fairly valuable exercise.
But surely taking notes on the fly when you have been barely introduced to the subject isn't going to help with that.
I found that taking structured, detailed notes in lectures forced me to pay close attention & work constantly to keep up with the lecturer. For the courses I did that for, it felt like it was equivalent to doing an entire extra revision session with the lecture material for me - I had to do much less work to go over the material after the lecture in order to make sure I understood it, so it was a far more efficient use of my time that just 'attending' the lectures and then doing revision work afterwards.
Some people can maintain that level of connection with the lecture without taking notes of course, but that’s what worked for me.
Learning is learning. He has clearly learnt how to do something. And do it well.
The entire article is very clear and well thought out. To me it signals a disciplined and methodical mind, that learns from doing. And we are lucky it's willing to share.
I did this in a Biochemistry course minus the Vim. It is definitely counterproductive and I started to do better once I switched back to traditional notes.
OP describes exactly how he abstracts away the mechanical task of writing LaTeX and can focus on the content. I did a similar thing in my classes and after a little bit of practice and tool adjustment you just don't think about LaTeX more than you think what pen to use or how to highlight something when handwriting.
And precisely because math is so content-dense, having your notes is important, as they will be organized in a similar way to how the content is organized in your mind. Yeah, there is a lot of study material but most of the time, unless the class follows a textbook literally, you'll want your own set of notes with only the class contents, and you'll want to organize that in a way that is easy for you to understand.
The only alternative I see is getting the lecture notes from your professor. I had one (math) lecturer who used to make his notes on the fly with his convertible Thinkpad (x230t or similar) and shared those notes with us afterward. In addition, he also had a clean script. That combination was awesome as you could focus on what he was explaining (or take additional notes if necessary).
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.
People are different, the processes in their minds goes different ways. People develops different styles of learning and then they adopt to that styles and adopt styles for themselves. So it is pointless to agree or disagree.
I personally like this idea of vim+LaTeX. It is close to what I did while studying math, though I write notes down with pen and paper. Mostly I wrote down them once and read them once before exam.
I remember some issues with this approach, but the one I remember most was due to incomplete recording, not due to "I didn't managed to understand this mess of greek letters while listening a lecture".
I remember some problems due to inability to understand, it was Galua theory, but I solved them by reading books. I had read three different authors on topic, and I think it was the only way, I think that any style of keeping records would not help more then mine.
And I hate to write greek letters by hand. There is one names xi, I never managed to figure out how to write it, so xi looked in my recordings as some messy knot of lines. All my xi's was different, but there was a bright side of this: xi was the only one, that was so messy, so I could understand that it is xi when I saw this mess. With LaTex xi looks nice and clear.
>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.
It is scientifically proven that handwriting is better for your memory because it forces you to process the material more than note taking on a laptop.
Agreed. Paper and pen is hard to beat when it comes to equations and improvising. Hats off to anyone with that level of Vim & LaTex skill though. Now that I'm in the workforce I use OneNote, Notepad, and Confluence for notes and documentation for the most part, but I still use a lot of pen and paper as well... especially when doing complex coding where I need to map out how all the data structures work before hand.
Fully agreed. We had two guys in university that would type to Latex the mathematics lecture notes and produced a neat script that everyone else used. They failed the course.
I object to this for completely different reasons. Do whatever you like to learn the material, but when you're sitting in a lecture, please don't have a laptop open -- it's terribly distracting for the other people in the room. You may stick resolutely to note-taking and have no messaging programs, games, or video playing. Even so, your constantly updating screen, your tapping keys, are a magnet for others' attention. And that's a best-case scenario by far. Few students are disciplined enough to stay off of Facebook during a lecture. Laptops have no place in a lecture hall.
Over the years I've audited a lot of math classes and tried various ways of taking notes.
I've found that live-TeXing lets me keep half my attention at best on the lecture. The people I've talked to about it agree. Also, when the professor requests for the class to be transcribed, the live-TeXing duty is rotated among the students as to not unduly impose on one of us.
I eventually gave up and moved to taking notes with an iPad and an Apple pencil, which has the quickness of handwritten notes, and the availability of digitized notes -- if I'm looking for something I can usually find it pretty quickly by navigating to the class and the (labeled) lectures.
Of course if live-TeXing works for someone, more power to them!
I use pen and paper notes for meetings & discussions. While I love the act of physically writing, not having notes accessible and searchable at the tips of my fingers means I am not able to get the most out of them.
This discussion is timely as I have been researching smart pens the last few days which can give you exact copies of your paper notes into an app. Anyone here used them? Do you like them?
I did live TeXing for about a year, after only having ~a year of emacs and latex use. It's not as hard as it sounds but yes like you mention, it takes your head out of the lecture and into your editor. However, the idea of 'rewrite your notes at the end of the day', who has the time for that though?
While I agree with you on the notes aspect of this (and have always used pen-and-paper notes), I do think that the setup described here would be quite useful for authoring papers -- I've always found it is way too painful to write out math-mode equations in LaTeX.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Org-mode is awesome, but the points about snippets still apply. AFAIR yasnippet should support most, if not all, capabilities presented in this article.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I do the same thing (markdown and mathjax) but I use 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!
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.
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.
[+] [-] kinkrtyavimoodh|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] txcwpalpha|7 years ago|reply
The mechanical task of taking notes is one of the most important parts of actually absorbing the material. It is not an either-or. Hearing/seeing the information, processing it in a way that makes sense to you individually, and then mechanically writing it down in a legible manner is one of the main methods that your brain learns. It's one of the primary reasons that taking notes is important in the first place. This is referred to as the "encoding hypothesis" [1].
There are actually even studies [2] that show that tools that assist in more efficient note taking, such as taking notes via typing rather than by hand, are actually detrimental to absorbing information, as it makes it easier for you to effectively pass the information directly from your ears to your computer without actually doing the processing that is required when writing notes by hand. This is why many universities prefer (or even require) notes to be taken by hand, and disallow laptops in class.
1: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0361476X78...
2: https://www.npr.org/2016/04/17/474525392/attention-students-...
[+] [-] _ux1n|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cycrutchfield|7 years ago|reply
So I can appreciate what OP has done here. I took notes in LaTeX for most of my undergraduate math courses (and some graduate ones), and I found it to be a fairly valuable exercise.
[+] [-] pja|7 years ago|reply
I found that taking structured, detailed notes in lectures forced me to pay close attention & work constantly to keep up with the lecturer. For the courses I did that for, it felt like it was equivalent to doing an entire extra revision session with the lecture material for me - I had to do much less work to go over the material after the lecture in order to make sure I understood it, so it was a far more efficient use of my time that just 'attending' the lectures and then doing revision work afterwards.
Some people can maintain that level of connection with the lecture without taking notes of course, but that’s what worked for me.
[+] [-] kodz4|7 years ago|reply
The entire article is very clear and well thought out. To me it signals a disciplined and methodical mind, that learns from doing. And we are lucky it's willing to share.
[+] [-] justwalt|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gjulianm|7 years ago|reply
And precisely because math is so content-dense, having your notes is important, as they will be organized in a similar way to how the content is organized in your mind. Yeah, there is a lot of study material but most of the time, unless the class follows a textbook literally, you'll want your own set of notes with only the class contents, and you'll want to organize that in a way that is easy for you to understand.
[+] [-] arendtio|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] setquk|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ordu|7 years ago|reply
I personally like this idea of vim+LaTeX. It is close to what I did while studying math, though I write notes down with pen and paper. Mostly I wrote down them once and read them once before exam. I remember some issues with this approach, but the one I remember most was due to incomplete recording, not due to "I didn't managed to understand this mess of greek letters while listening a lecture".
I remember some problems due to inability to understand, it was Galua theory, but I solved them by reading books. I had read three different authors on topic, and I think it was the only way, I think that any style of keeping records would not help more then mine.
And I hate to write greek letters by hand. There is one names xi, I never managed to figure out how to write it, so xi looked in my recordings as some messy knot of lines. All my xi's was different, but there was a bright side of this: xi was the only one, that was so messy, so I could understand that it is xi when I saw this mess. With LaTex xi looks nice and clear.
[+] [-] Rainymood|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lastUsername|7 years ago|reply
https://www.google.com/url?q=https://linguistics.ucla.edu/pe...
[+] [-] 4thaccount|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m_mueller|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sevensor|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akalin|7 years ago|reply
I've found that live-TeXing lets me keep half my attention at best on the lecture. The people I've talked to about it agree. Also, when the professor requests for the class to be transcribed, the live-TeXing duty is rotated among the students as to not unduly impose on one of us.
I eventually gave up and moved to taking notes with an iPad and an Apple pencil, which has the quickness of handwritten notes, and the availability of digitized notes -- if I'm looking for something I can usually find it pretty quickly by navigating to the class and the (labeled) lectures.
Of course if live-TeXing works for someone, more power to them!
[+] [-] 2muchcoffeeman|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] navneetloiwal|7 years ago|reply
This discussion is timely as I have been researching smart pens the last few days which can give you exact copies of your paper notes into an app. Anyone here used them? Do you like them?
[+] [-] meko|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cyphar|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] klodolph|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dangom|7 years ago|reply
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 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography
[+] [-] akrout|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hliyan|7 years ago|reply
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_|7 years ago|reply
I agree. However, if I want to be able to refer to them afterwards, I really need to take electronic notes.
[+] [-] miki123211|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trombonechamp|7 years ago|reply
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
or for documentation:
https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~mwshinn/+junk/notes3/view/head...
[+] [-] z3t4|7 years ago|reply
* 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|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] war1025|7 years ago|reply
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
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mise_en_place
[+] [-] elagost|7 years ago|reply
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|7 years ago|reply
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
3b1b animation: https://github.com/3b1b/manim
[+] [-] EdwardCoffin|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] erk__|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluenose69|7 years ago|reply
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 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.
[+] [-] ska|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ygra|7 years ago|reply
- 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.
[+] [-] jclay|7 years ago|reply
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|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] steventhedev|7 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] quietbritishjim|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sus_007|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ShepherdKing|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nso95|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] redbumble|7 years ago|reply
Easy to install, wysiwym, works out-of-the-box!
[+] [-] mathblocks|7 years ago|reply
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 if you are curious how it works.
[+] [-] twiceaday|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andbberger|7 years ago|reply
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.