A year and a half ago, I wrote about Gilles Castel’s video on taking math class notes. I found his workflow astounding. He was able to take LaTeX notes in Math class at speed. By “at speed” I mean he was able to keep up with the instructor. If you’ve ever written in LaTeX you know that Castel’s feat is pretty impressive. His secret sauce was the Vim UltiSnips snippets package.
At the time, I speculated about doing the same thing with AUCTeX and yasnippets. Yasnippets aren’t as powerful as UltiSnips but I felt Castel’s workflow could be more or less translated to Emacs.
I just saw this post by karthink that explains how he does the same thing in Emacs. His secret sauce is AUCTeX, Yasnaippets, and CDLaTeX. He doesn’t have a long video like Castel’s but there are some shorter GIF animations that show his system in operation. The real winner here is CDLaTeX, an Emacs package written by Carsten Dominick, that allows the fast and easy entry of LaTeX input. I didn’t know about CDLaTeX but it turns out to be really useful. You can use it anywhere in Emacs but there’s also a special interface for it in Org-mode.
If you’re like me and need to write occasional mathematics in Org, it’s just what you need to make it as painless as possible. It even has a which-key-like hinting system so you don’t need a cheat sheet to get going. Take a look at karthink’s post or the Org manual to see how to enable it.
If you’re taking mathematical notes or even if you merely need to write some occasional mathematics, you should definitely take a look at his post. There’s also a pointer to some of the snippets he uses.
Update : ACUTeX → AUCTeX.