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

github.com/SirCharlieMars/dot... and castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-1/

[@SeniorMarsTries]

share.cleanshot.com/5PMGLW This is also something I have to convert general math-code style notation into LaTeX. I have a snippet for wolfgram alpha too!

[@orlandop.8131]

v cool

[@dyanosis]

Never heard of "wolfgram alpha". Must be a new thing.

[@jonathanerhard197]

@@dyanosis ye it's a very simple calculator for adding two integers smaller than 10

[@danikisana-aleximaksik7199]

how did you customize your mac soo nicely, exspecially firefox. What is the font and theme you're using. And great video! I will consider to way of taking notes. thanks

[@RanEncounter]

You typoed Lemma in your preamle and in the template files. I have never heard of Lenma... Also you missed a \usepackage{slantsc} for small caps in some fonts. Otherwise great template. Edit: This is wrong: "Also you missed a \usepackage{slantsc} for small caps in some fonts." You did not miss any packages, but used \sc which overrides other fonts types. Use \textsc instead ah it is nested in some other command. I cannot find the place where the font nesting happens. Edit 2: I found the error. You need \usepackage{bold-extra} to make for example the contents actually show the font you coded. Edit 3: Now there was an error in the definition font sizes that got fixed when adding \RequirePackage{fix-cm} to the very beginning of the template file. Now it finally compiles without errors :D

[@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.

[@SeniorMarsTries]

I think I am committed to bceoming a mathematician!

[@nickp7526]

Don't worry, this is still the case. During my time as a math major (2018-2022), almost all of my pure math classes were 100% chalkboard.

[@henloitsdiego]

Chalkboards rule !

[@memeperor_]

My cal 1 professor FORBID the use of laptops during class. Even when I just had my convertible laptop open for the first 2 minutes to set up my notes before flipping to tablet mode, she'd scream at me to close my laptop... I mean I honestly don't see how someone would prefer typing math to writing it by hand, either on paper or tablet... Sometimes I feel like I seriously CANNOT learn from a math textbook, and this guy's notes just look like he recreated the textbook in latex. I would not be reading my own notes effectively if they looked exactly like my textbook, but obviously notetaking is all personal subjective preference. I don't mean to sound like a hater tho, this is seriously cool, I just don't have the linux chops to do this efficiently enough in a way that would benefit me.

[@MrBa143]

@@memeperor_ Tbf often i didnt use my notes after writing them and i also wrote the whole textbook as my notes. I think i did it because writing it down almost 1:1, it just stuck better in my head.

[@nickp7526]

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.

[@SeniorMarsTries]

I'm very sad to hear that. I love his guides.

[@bachpham6862]

I saw that on his blog, but don't know how he died. Just curious, do you have any detail on this?

[@fishyang2453]

?why? Isn't he doing a Ph.D??

[@ISCARI0T]

how he died tho

[@someone-cw8yl]

How do you know? I dont see this anywhere

[@samuelsherriff730]

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!

[@SeniorMarsTries]

Thank you! This comment means a lot to me!

[@dayone1992]

you sound like he just designed and implemented warp drive, I mean common kiddo you'll get used to these, nothing crazy

[@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!

[@AhmedIsam]

Start with overleaf, its a web version of this setup.

[@khoda81]

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

[@squidwardstesticles5914]

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

[@LudieMasu]

i can’t thank you enough for the clarity you bring to your topics! ☀️

[@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

[@grasstoucher856]

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.

[@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.

[@Thebigbean114]

Vim while pretty complicated on its own right, is a very customizable text editor so you can do whatever you want with it which sounds cool but it's can be quite the learnings curve however when you do get the hang of it you can do things 10x faster than any other text editor imo

[@Mnaughten601]

@@colep14 I haven’t used atom for years, but it was the last editor I used when learning C. Only do latex work now so use texmaker

[@whannabi]

I've tried this exact combo and It was very hard to use.

[@boo_1096]

I personally have swapped Vim with pure LaTeX for Emacs with Org-mode which I then export to PDF with LaTeX as an intermediate step. For all the simple markup things I can use Org syntax, which similar to Markdown, and for more complex stuff I can basically just write it in LaTeX. A bonus for me is also that I can have the LaTeX snippets automatically preview inside the Emacs buffer.

[@ghosthunter0950]

@@boo_1096 while emacs with org-mode is great I really recommend adding in evil mode for the vim motions because they're just awesome (it doesn't take any longer than an hour to learn them to a usable level). you have this already setup in something like projects like doom emacs. I really recommend trying it out! I'm personally a vim lover but the live preview in the same file is just sweet so I'm heavily considering just switching to doom emacs for mathematics.

[@stargasm1000]

Great video! This really shows the power of both Latex and Vim. Congratulations on having achieved this level of proficiency.

[@tjocraft8541]

you like mastadoon

[@artemiz9607]

What a nice video! It shows a use case of LaTex and this is exactly what I needed! I've never used LaTex but now I can figure out how I could.

[@SonderCS]

You are crazy good!!!! Don't be nervous with something this your confident in! Keep it up man!

[@davidmorley4455]

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!

[@FerdinandCoding]

VS Code has the LaTeX Workshop extension. Have you tried it?

[@davidmorley4455]

@@FerdinandCoding Yes I've used the LaTeX Workshop extension, it's decent allows autoload on save and some nice symbol inserting, but a pretty trivial wrapper for just default tex-workshop.

[@FerdinandCoding]

@@davidmorley4455 Appreciate your insight, cheers.

[@crixi__]

I was wondering if there is any plugins to make vscode behave like his vim, for example concealing $, \[ and \] or replacing \in with ∈ and \cap with ∩. VSCode supports snippets, is that what I would use or would I look for extensions?

[@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!

[@lawrdgamer]

Looks really neat and seems to work well for you! Thank you for sharing

[@MiliAxe]

Great video! Thanks for sharing your Vim content. Hope to see more of this content soon.

[@maisiefreeman8597]

This is invaluable for us physics majors too - thanks for the walkthrough!

[@WantedMonsterHunter]

I am a physics major but still write all my notes, especially my thesis currently using latex so this video helped alot. Thanks!

[@SeniorMarsTries]

Just to show that it's very possible to type up all your notes, here are the notes I showed in the video: drive.google.com/file/d/1T3g1rymJ0mcPcFul0dVyl_I3tEzD21PX/view?usp=sharing

[@Djake3tooth]

Is it possible that on page 5, it says "0 * 1 = 1" in the line which proves the identity rule (which should be "0 * 1 = 0" or "1 * 1 = 1")?

[@injeolmi6]

THANK YOU SO MUCH! I needed something like this. I really appreciate it.

[@TON-vz3pe]

Awesome bro. You have given me a new hobby to work with. Thanks!

[@MRGAMERMA243]

Thank you so much for your tutorials It went from 'nice tutoet science' to simple logic! You have a new subscriber

[@davidnguyen9065]

Amazing man! I personally find LaTeX hard, you're really good to be able to do all of this and vim

[@meat-baller]

Great video man. Just started using vim and latex for my linear algebra assignments this semester; your template looks a lot cleaner though haha. Thank you for mentioning vimtext, sounds super useful!

[@ianbridges6040]

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.

[@AFGautonompunk]

thank you so much for bringing this to our attention! i also study mathematics and just get into vim & obsidian : )

[@giovanniferro8065]

Had some hard time installing everything but it worked (fairly new to nvim, and vim)... Thanks for the explanation!

[@octonwoomy1150]

i just stumbled upon this video in my recommended and it just so happened to be posted on my birthday last year

[@samuelmcdonagh1590]

This is really impressive. As a physics masters student, I’m not so sure I’ll actually be able to use it due to the lack of problem sheets we get given, but I’d love to!

[@NoNo-oe4ft]

holy shit dude, I followed his guide as well but you just showed me the power of this

[@maad1670]

Where has this been all my life... so cool

[@warsmith1294]

Wow that's pretty cool, I had no idea you could go to this extreme when it comes to note taking.

[@Concordeagle]

I was at Rice in 1995 as a compsci major and we used LaTex back then for our papers. It was all on Sun Unix machines. Some things never change..

[@candor8011]

That’s so cool!!! I’m faaar from any kind of work like that

[@clarencelucas1256]

Charlie, pls pls pls do a tutorial! Im entering school as a math major this year and Ive been looking for a system like this for a while. Youre genius for this and I hope you make a tutorial soon or point us to the resources you used

[@Marco-kd7jk]

Phenomenal rundown.

[@alvapazz]

great notes. they do look fine. amazing.

[@leanhdung1994]

RIP... Thank you so much for your dedicated contribution!

[@KonstantinKrasser]

Using skim 'll resolve the error at 06:00 "Vier could't find Zathura window ID!" Also creates, most informativ KZbin video I've seen in like forever. Great job!

[@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.

[@ankitkaul3843]

TNice tutorials is absolutly the best video of the world you expaining skills are good and it was a honor to see tNice tutorials vid well done

[@lrochacastro2308]

hey brother, great video! there's no need to be nervous :) thanks for the tips

[@nabbikill]

Copilot in latex is crazy smart, nice idea you gave me

[@TheFootballPlaya]

this is awesome man. i will be referring to this later.

[@op_gamer3346]

Thank you so much this helped a lot!!!! You saved my life

[@sohamchatterjee750]

Its feels nice to see you are using my preamble macros and letterfonts setup for your notes. Thanksfor showing my github repo on latex in your video. I am that lamdasolver in 3:31

[@tjocraft8541]

I'm completely new to this, what tutorial shoould i follow cause I'm still confused.

[@tjocraft8541]

Don't you need linux to get zathura

[@ryandennler3155]

This is really really nice... Thanks for this.

[@warrenatkison9546]

This video inspired me to setup vim as my main latex editor. As someone with very limited knowledge about linux/GNU software it was incredibly difficult for me to get everything up and running on my macbook but after about a week of searching through countless GitHub pages, ive finally got something that beats what i was doing before (overleaf) and it was 100% worth it!

[@loicboucher-dubuc4563]

wow those notes look insane!!!

[@arulandu]

I'm glad to see at least 1 other person does this :)

[@nemod.8310]

I used to do this in my physics classes. It's super handy

[@halley_lu]

Cool video! I also use LaTeX to type up my math notes in lecture, but I happen to lean more heavily on my typing speed (can burst up to 180 wpm, can maintain an average of 120-130 wpm for longer durations but obviously it's slower when typing in LaTeX), VSCode shortcuts, and macros I define in my own .sty file. Nice to see how other people do it too.

[@TechToppers]

Finally found a VS Code person yyay! I'm a school student, but everyone arounds just uses some wicked text editor like vim. I still haven't figured out a way to use vimtex yet 😆

[@flokkq7931]

Love from the programming side of things! A Math major using vim, great!

[@WhenIHit88MPH]

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.

[@kiryls1207]

try obsidian for note taking. it has md (with instant preview) and you can embed math formulas (and much, very much more)

[@TAP7a]

Not to dissuade anyone from switching to Linux, but Windows also has Pandoc. I’ve not seen any implementation outside of RMarkdown in RStudio that has made it work nicely, but it definitely exists

[@JacobDuenke]

Hey this was really cool! Enjoyed the video!

[@gilboewer4107]

If he says Um one more time I'm gonna break my monitor

[@rodrigocornidez1917]

Thanks for sharing this! Great video.

[@andymoawad1222]

I loved this video. As you mentioned its more of a show of your setup. Do you think you could do some tutorial videos on how to get a similar setup? I am about to start typing my thesis and would love more detailed guides.

[@smokeyoak]

Bro is nervous recording a video thats not even live. Thanks for showing it, I like your setup. I'm interested in taking some math classes and want to write up notes in LaTeX

[@Stev02112]

Super cool! Thanks for sharing.

[@deletedaxiom6057]

I graduated with a double major in mathematics and computer science. I used both vim and LaTeX a lot, never did I think to use them together. I also was a fan of Mathpix, i figured out much later there are a few free python alternatives to mathpix. Also for people who don't want to learn vim, (there is a bitof a learning cudve) you can use word or pages and in the equation options (the carrot) you can use latex. i do like using vim as a text editor because all Linux distrosi know of, have at least vi installed. good video though sir, thanks for sharing

[@ericaltenburg]

Ya know it’s funny because the article you pull up about 2/3 of the way through is the exact article I read as well which helped me with latex back when I was in college.

[@dylanhall2993]

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

[@elliebarrett3648]

You're doing great!

[@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.

[@hemanthkotagiri8865]

That's crazy. I always wanted to try Emacs but I kinda move away considering how huge the eco system is. And i already spent about a couple of years in tweaking my Vim config, and i just don't want to spend more time in a completely new editor(even though there are distributions such as Spacemacs or something like that).

[@jakobfassunge6067]

@@hemanthkotagiri8865 You can take a look at doom emacs. This could be exactly the thing you are looking for in order to get into emacs

[@jamess.2491]

Yeah, I am an nvim user for programming but for this use case I would also recommend emacs. Much more what something like this is geared towards.

[@Smface]

i use emacs for programming but have not played around with org-mode much. thanks for the suggestion

[@SeniorMarsTries]

I actually have used org-mode and eMacs. It’s super powerful, but I’m just so used to Nvim that it’s a pain to switch

[@flip4119]

Great video, thanks man!

[@opposite342]

Personally I use typora as my go-to for every notes since it has markdown, html, and mathjax latex built-in. It of course has it's own sets of problems (PDF conversion is not the greatest: some aligning problems, pagination, and photos etc). Of course my method is much less effort in learning compared to this so I very much appreciate the efforts you did to adapt the templates and learn this effectively. I probably would not change my method of typing notes for a while but I'll try dabble into this.

[@juliocezarsilva5979]

For similar reasons I use Obsidian

[@Gerz970]

Your notes are formatted nicer than some of my textbooks.

[@tjocraft8541]

lol some

[@aaronklinker8269]

Haha I did this in college as well (minus vim)! All my notes were in markdown, and latex worked really well.

[@noodle7788]

This video changed my life

[@vladvesa8296]

Essentially amazing 🤪😉

[@MystifyJW]

Go Owls! I use our free overleaf subscription and take Latex notes mech courses and sometimes even collaborate on them. Currently a senior at Lovett so it’s funny to get something like this in my recommended and then notice you are/were a Rice student too!

[@aleksd.6465]

Definitely inspiring! 😊

[@medved3027]

I solved this problem in a much simpler way in the 90s - by having friends who _are_ good at handwriting. I would take notes myself, of course (otherwise I can hardly remember anything), but I would also photocopy their notes to reference before the exams where my own handwriting is not clear, or where I couldn't keep up. There's argument to be made for using such a method even now. The way things are going, within 5 years computers will be able to parse even the most un-parseable notes into clean LaTeX, and fix them up on the fly.

[@Futtking1234]

yo bro, really thankya. Big respect

[@lachlanflorez8809]

Super valuable to see thankyou

[@gurvir7284]

is there any way youd be able to do like an in depth tutorial on how to get this started on mac. id really like to try taking notes like 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.

[@cheesofile666]

Templates exist so that you, the author, need not encumber yourself with useless Latex trivia. Additionally, journals don't want you messing with their template.

[@KrishnenduSKar]

Apart from your amazing vim setup and the latex workflow I'm really interested in the web-browser you're using. The top bar says firefox and if it is Firefox could you please share how you've made it so minimalistic. Being a big fan of LaTeX I've often tried to have all my notes digitised using LaTeX. I'm an overleaf user, and it can be quite tedious at times, and very slow using a web based latex editor. That made me move to other options like obsidian or hand written notes using goodnotes. Looking at your workflow I'm convinced that my desire of having all my notes in a specific order and keep it organized is not impossible. Thanks a ton for sharing your workflow!! Inspired!!

[@jammyy22]

that's firefox in headless start i think

[@ZachBradyisBrachZady]

I too would like to know more about this FF setup.

[@atharvakale343]

anyone figure this out?

[@kenwood7195]

Came here from Reddit for the vim, now I have to go and learn Latex.

[@yejimmy3533]

true legend🔥

[@ymarmash]

Excellent. I love it.

[@matthewbrough123890]

man couldnt figure out how to close vim so developed a whole note taking method around it

[@SeniorMarsTries]

😢

[@NeotenicApe]

Hey, love the vid! Where do you keep all your macros relative to your projects for easy use?

[@Eta_Carinae__]

Oh god, that's pretty. Also a math major - I'm handwritten, which is slower but I am nowhere as efficient in Vim as you. For some topics I'll write TeX in Jupyter's markdown, which you can format in HTML which is nice, but I genuinely had no idea TeX alone was that powerful. Thanks for the upload. EDIT: Yeah, for me this unit is called Linear Algebra 2. It's pretty tough since the material has notes _and_ lectures in spades - difficult to keep up with, but worth it! Started on vector spaces and ended on Jordan-normal form, pretty much.

[@monochromeart7311]

"handwritten" Handwriting is literally my nightmare due to physical limitations.

[@casualoutlaw540]

@@monochromeart7311 Cursive helped me quite a lot with handwritten notes. I just write as fast as possible with cursive, then get them in a more readable format when I have time

[@monochromeart7311]

@@casualoutlaw540 my writing looks quite good (at least that's what I'm told), but my hands start to hurt after as little as 10 words, and the pain only goes up. My only solution is surgery, which is not an option.

[@casualoutlaw540]

@@monochromeart7311 It might be the way you're holding the pen or maybe you're pressing too hard on the pen/paper and it causes your hand to hurt. I personally just write basically gibbering when writing fast, so I do that in class, then later rewrite it either with latex or by hand. This helps me revise what we learned, have clean notes and organized notes. It's hard to know where to write what, and if something is worth writing in class. So it is much easier to rewrite everything later anyways purely for organization.

[@monochromeart7311]

@@casualoutlaw540 no, my hands are literally fucked up, especially the tendons. The only thing doctors could offer is a surgery which can ruin other functionalities.

[@RafaelToscano]

Wow, I don't even do mathematics and don't use Latex but this video was very nice. The notes look very neat. Which makes me want to test it solving some math problems and creating notes for the solutions :D

[@SeniorMarsTries]

I'm glad to hear that! Math is fun!

[@RafaelToscano]

@@SeniorMarsTries yesss. I’m a software engineer and didn’t touch math for a long time. More algorithms and some analysis of algs. But recently I started studying mathematics again to remember Calculus, linear algebra, etc. And I love vim! So I will definitely give this note taking system a try.

[@MartinDerTolle]

This is awesome. Your notes look like they're taken from a Math book

[@SeniorMarsTries]

Thank you!

[@joem8251]

Did you have any issues with Synctex working with zathura? If so, how did you solve them? I am running vimtex on an updated Ubuntu container and I believe recent versions of zathura don't support synctex, which synchronizes the text editor and pdf viewer. The documentation recommends a workaround: "build zathura from source, manually"; but I thought I did that with "apt-get install zathura -y" in the Dockerfile, after installing vim.

[@valeenoi2284]

Oh lord! We had that one guy who would take notes in console Vim in college... back in 2004. Drove me nuts.

[@SeniorMarsTries]

same that's why i use nano :)

[@valeenoi2284]

@@SeniorMarsTries No Emacs? 😁

[@kenneth_romero]

this dude could make an easy buck selling his notes as an "official" companion piece to the class. those notes look sick af

[@kech-agmaio8620]

that's a really nice neofetch

[@ImStian]

"You're gonna be fast"

[@mnk4_all_caps]

U both r genius

[@EvrYRAp]

I am trying this out. thank you

[@ayushjaiswar3628]

thanks a lot!!! so nice reverb

[@apocalypticbean]

very cool. Thanks for sharing👍

[@john.dough.]

Wow! Very impressive :)