I’ve written previously about the PhD workflows of Gilles Castel and Sam Wallace. They’re Emacs based and highly efficient. Now, Tony Zorman has published his own PhD workflow. It’s also Emacs based and has several interesting wrinkles.
The most salient aspect of Zorman’s setup is that he’s using XMonad as his window manager. That provides a lot of automation and integration in his desktop. In particular, he uses the XMonad TopicSpace module to provide a separate workspace for each of his projects. Each topic space has its own directory and startup hook to provide consistent views.
He uses org-roam as a knowledge database and take notes using Org-mode but uses the usual AUCTeX/CDLaTeX combination along with aas for taking formal notes and writing papers. I’d be more reliant on Org-mode than AUCTeX for typesetting my Mathematics but I’m sure he’s used to his workflow and it seems to be working very well for him.
His post has lots of examples and animated GIFs so you can see things in action. The post serves as a great example of using Emacs and XMonad together to build a great workflow. Give his post a read if you’re interested in implementing a research workflow of your own. As I say, he has lots of good ideas.