A month ago I wrote about Gilles Castel’s system for taking notes with LaTeX during Math lectures. As I wrote at the time, I was astounded that he could type the LaTeX fast enough to keep up with the lecturer. It turned out he used a snippet completion system and some Vim customizations to make it possible. Castel’s post didn’t explain how he drew the figures to go with the text.
Now Castel has published a second post that explains how he’s able to draw those figures. Take a look at either post to see some of those figures: they’re professional quality drawings rendered directly in the LaTeX.
Once again, he does this with some snippets and Vim customizations along with the use of Inkscape, a vector graphics editor that’s freely available for Linux, macOS, and Windows. As with entering the mathematical text, the secret of his speed is the aggressive optimization of keystrokes, including a Python program that filters his keystrokes before passing them onto Inkscape. Castel’s post has several animated GIFs that show the process in action.
Most or all of what’s he’s doing could easily be ported to Emacs/AUCTeX. A bit of Elisp could replace his first script and probably his Python filtering program although I’m not sure of the details for replacing the filtering program. If you’re interested on porting his system to Emacs and, say, macOS, it should be fairly easy to do the necessary research.