Gilles Castel

This is a Typst + Neovim live preview project: https://github.com/chomosuke/typst-preview.nvim It looks similar to Gilles Castel's famous note-taking setup: https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-1/ I would love to see someone combine this with Anki for quick math flashcard creation

I took notes in LaTeX in my college. I didn't need macros or the fancy editor setup. It's not hard. It turned passive learning into active. I didn't have a few of the formatting nuances as pretty as he did (e.g. boxes around theorems), but that's not hard. The key difference between him and me are the figures. It's worth looking at his notes here: https://castel.dev/notes The figures are beautiful. How?!?!?!? (Footnote due to recent bad experiences to pre-empt stupid answers: "Inkscape" is not an answer. I use Inkscape, and I know how long these things would take me. It's definitely not something I could do anywhere close to real-time. I want to know what conceivable workflow in Inkscape would allow those sorts of figures in even a significant fraction of lecture speed, let alone real-time)

One of my favourite things about (desktop) Geogebra is its ability to export to tikz. Making complicated geometric shapes in a latex file can be done so easily with Geogebra. Perhaps not as elegant as Castel, but still quite nice. https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-1/

You might want to check out those blog posts: https://castel.dev

Just kind of a side note - Gilles's work is such a pleasure to browse, worth taking a look. Always made with deep understanding of the content and a spartan taste in design: https://castel.dev/notes

This is interesting and follows the line of [1]. Personally I find it more comfortable to use TeXmacs for quick/throwaway notes, and macros in longer documents for better readability. [1]: https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-1/

Both texmacs and lyx are excellent products, especially in the seamless integration of images and diagrams. More traditionally, Vim and Emacs can be used with snippets and vimtex/auctex quite efficiently, both for interactive note-taking and to prepare large documents. Gilles Castel has an excellent guide on the Vim side [0], and I cannot help mentioning my system [1] which I think produces pretty clear latex code. [0] https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-1/ [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/jtjol5/cinnamon_latex_workf…

Typing with LaTeX within Vim can be as fast (or even faster) than in the Word processors. You can use the power of Vim plugins, concealments, and customized snippets. Most probably the same can be done inside Emacs as well. See the excellent article[1] on how to set up your Vim to follow the mathematics lectures in real time. [1] https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-1/

>I want to know what conceivable workflow in Inkscape would allow those sorts of figures in even a significant fraction of lecture speed, let alone real-time https://github.com/gillescastel/inkscape-shortcut-manager https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-2/ I've also done LaTeX for notes (in EMACS), but was never happy with how things looked when doing everything quick. The sheer genius of the setup he made is eye-opening.

I am unable to reply to any comments, so I’ll add my reply to blagie as a top-level comment instead: Gilles himself documents his process of using Inkscape here: https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-2/ As a summary, he uses a custom keyboard shortcut manager¹ which allows him to compos multiple keystrokes (and also saves commonly used styles): > For example, when I press `s` and `f` simultaneously, my shortcut manager will apply a solid stroke and a grey fill to the current selection. When I want the stroke to be thick, I press `s+f+g` together, where `g` stands for thick (as the `t` key is hard to reach). [1]: he makes it available on GitHub: https://github.com/gillescastel/inkscape-shortcut-manager

According to the comments in the most recent post on this blog the author has passed away: https://castel.dev/post/research-workflow/ I stumbled on this blog recently when researching the same topic (nvim +latex). I found this more recent blog (https://www.ejmastnak.com/tutorials/vim-latex/intro/), by another author, inspired by this original author useful as well. I found this blog post to be very helpful and the author was obviously a very good writer and I am sure he will be missed. Condolences to his friends and family.

There is the option of incorporating vim with LaTeX. Gilles Castel goes over this in [0] Results of lecture notes can be seen here [1] [0] https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-1/#vim-and-latex [1] https://castel.dev/notes

Besides IPE, there is also Asymptote. (https://asymptote.sourceforge.io/) I think the lack of uptake is due to inertia. It takes a lot of effort to get up to speed with any system, so you are most likely to start with and stay with whatever people you know are already using, which seems to usually be TikZ. For just the occasional illustration, it's easier to make do with something like Inkscape. (https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-2/)

Sorry, I don't know anything about Kig. It seems that it is similar to GeoGebra? Anyway. You may find this post interesting: https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-2/

This one? https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-1/ HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19448678

Never explained how diagrams e.g. top of this page[1] can be done mid-lecture. [1] https://castel.dev/static/cb323a2ec665d98f93f78e13d3972e0e/41b08/ca3.p…

> I found Orgmode was amazing for writing LaTeX documents - but I wasn't working with other people. This is probably the best way to type notes (and diagrams!) in class. It also works awesome for pretty much everything else in life too, when it comes to taking notes, especially for STEM work. I hope this helps! :-) * How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim: https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-1/ * GitHub repo for above: https://github.com/gillescastel/latex-snippets * How I draw figures for my mathematical lecture notes using Inkscape: https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-2/ * GitHub repo for above: https://github.com/gillescastel/inkscape-figures * How I manage my LaTeX lecture notes: https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-3/ * GitHub repo for above: https://github.com/gillescastel/university-setup

I copied (most of) my method for taking live LaTeX notes from this guy. https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-1/

To add, here is an interesting resource on how one might go about doing that using Vim and LaTeX: https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-1/

> https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-1/ Very nice! Thank you.

A couple of things that might be of interest: 1) pandoc is awesome. 2) There are integrated development environments that allow you to write in markdown and output to pdf, html, and word with the flick of a switch. Rstudio with knitr, bookdown, and markdown has some nice functionality. Plus you can do graphs and drawings and embed them in the the rmd (r markdown) text. 3) There is an earlier post in HN from Gilles Castel on how to speedily write text through the ultisnips package. Very much a game changer on how I use vim to work with anything text related. https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-1/ Nice post!

He's working in a space he has mastery. Like, look at this legend with his live note taking of Inkscape + Latex. I would have been like two orders of magnitude slower https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-2/

> Started using Inkscape in 2007 to illustrate a math paper, and been using it ever since whenever I needed to TeX something up. That reminds me of this series of posts I read a while back: • https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-1/ • https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-2/ • https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-3/ > I only recently came across TikZ which is an even more epic way to TeX up fancy diagrams (you "program" them). Still use inkscape for most stuff though. Check out link 2 in particular there.

This blog post has a nice workflow that discusses how they take notes for their math classes in vim. It's an interesting read regardless if you want to go this route or not. I think it was on HN not long ago. "How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim -" https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-1/

See https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-2/