Two and a half years ago, I wrote about Gilles Castel’s astounding ability to take math notes at speed using LaTeX and Vim. As someone who once came perilously close to being lapped on a three panel blackboard by a Math professor, I found this amazing yet Castel says he can keep up with his professors. A year ago, I wrote about a post on reddit by karthink that gave a quick overview of how he did the same thing with Emacs.
Now Karthink has long post that goes into detail on how he does it. If you’re like me, you probably think that most of the magic involves yasnippet but karthink uses yasnippet almost as an afterthought. All the heavy lifting is done by AUCTeX and CDLaTeX. Karthink presents his methods in three stages: AUCTeX, CDLaTeX, and yasnippet. You can, he says, get a long way just with AUCTeX.
CDLaTeX provides a series of shortcut keys that can really speed things up. For example, `a gives you α, `> gives →, ``R gives \Re, and ```s gives \sin. Most of these are mnemonic and in any event, CDLaTeX will pop up a which-key-like help screen if you delay for a second.
Finally, he uses yasnippet for those things not covered by AUCTeX and CDLaTeX. He has a pointer to his snippets but says you should make your own specialized for your particular needs.
Happily, my days of taking class notes are over but it’s still nice to know how to speed up entering mathematical notation while I’m in Emacs or Org-mode. If you’re a student taking Math classes, you should take a look at Karthink’s post.