How I take notes as a Math major using Vim + LaTeX

hello everyone my name is charlie or some people might know me as senior mars and today i'm going to be making a video of just essentially just showcasing uh how i write my math notes or complete my math homework as a math major in college uh using vim and law tech uh so essentially um one of the things i've always you know viewed myself as is or recognize uh quality about myself is that i don't have the best handwriting um and this is kind of a problem because especially in math you kind of just want to be writing down the notes uh but you want to be able to reread the notes especially when you're trying to solve problems later on a pset you're going to need those definitions you're going to need everything and it's and it's really nice that we have a textbook but sometimes the textbook doesn't really go over solution like uh how to prove something so you're just gonna have to make sure your notes allow you to do that um so in this case i just wanted to make like show people how i essentially do write my notes not my you know by personally handwriting everything but uh just typing everything up um during class and also doing my psets um well just typing everything my p sets up um so you know i just want to make it clear also that this is not a tutorial but more like like how i do things in general um i think this is really going to be nice because sometimes you know as long as you are you understand that there's a way to do this you can do it and that's essentially what i want to show um so for this example i'm going to be just showing you one of my uh math classes um math 354 honestly now or honors linear algebra uh and how i essentially do things um so the first thing i kind of want to show is essentially uh this is um so this we're in week like five right now and in week five i've been just having and during the past five weeks i've been just typing all my notes up um and i got into the point where my notes look something like this um and actually i already have it here so let me just close down that window uh so this these are these are what my notes look like um i think they look really nice and hopefully you agree um in case you're wondering how i made my law tech document look like this i'll go on a bit um but yeah so let's let's just get started so this is a problem set um that is due this friday so thankfully i've i got an extension and we're going to be able to just move on ahead um so and essentially what i i do is you know i do everything on terminal um so i essentially uh just have a directory here that uh where i just put my uh essentially all my psets my tests and my notes um and what i would like to do is just do something like pset four i created a directory with pset four um and then i essentially just copied down my personal template that i made so in case you're wondering my personal template uh github.com uh charlie mars there we go this is my personal template um um i will be sharing the link in the description of course uh but essentially my personal template just takes a lot of inspiration about these two sources you can get it looking more into them uh and essentially all you have to do is just copy these three files or four files and then into some directory and then you can just edit template.text you can also rename template.text to whatever you want um and essentially what i'm going to be showing you is how i use this template to quickly write my math notes in real time which i think should be really useful for a lot um if you just want to see how the template looks in general i put like a random examples right here but i won't go into that because i will be showing you how i do this uh so once i copy kind of everything down um i can start editing um the logitech file with uh my text editor and my text editor is called vim um and vim is extremely useful for um not taking ex ah so once i you know i open up a document um put you know change my name with like or like you know set up like the template um i essentially start to uh you know just do some quick little edits in my template um and then and then i start to really really just get into it um so because um bim and then and a plug-in i use um which everything just kind of operates on this thing um in the plug-in it's called bintex uh which is amazing plug-in if you use uh bim and want to do something uh want to use bloodtech um i would honestly really recommend it it allows you to essentially just continuous compile your document in the background and then just have it automatically appeared in your pdf viewer if your pdf viewer supports that um so essentially what i do is first i um do a vintex compile and then what i do is uh and i'm gonna get this little error because in the mac os if you're using um these things in linux you won't get this error unfortunately i've been trying to search how to find this problem out but it's not um i haven't found a great solution yet uh and then i'm essentially and then i have this keybind um in the meantime um and here's my keybind that essentially just starts up this my pdf viewer which is called the thorough uh and then just opens up the the template or like uh the name of the pdf in the background um so once i do that and then just press and let me just make sure that everyone can view my keys and there we go [Music] and start yeah okay so in the bottom right you should be able to see my keys so once i press i have this keybind shortcut once i press alt q um i can now see my problem set um and again this is only just the like just the title uh but that already is really nice um and then essentially i just go to my pset and then use this other tool essentially what i i you know most of my mac professors actually do write their uh their questions um in law tech as well so i want to be able to like essentially just copy and paste that um and just be able to uh paste it in so i use this tool called map pics i i think that's what you call it um and essentially it allows me to um to just you know like uh kind of convert all this text that's clearly in law tech um to logic code and then i can paste it in so what i do is just do that um and then go back here and then just press this copy button and now we have essentially all the the problems in my uh thing uh but because i use this custom um i guess this custom [Music] a template i like to you know make them a bit more fancier and the way i do that is just doing by just setting up my questions like this and then just uh doing that uh and then just you know i always get ten questions for problem set so i kind of know how many questions i have um and all i do is essentially convert um everything that the problems that was given to us and it seems that for this one we have something like this so that's cool um and then there we go uh and i'm gonna quickly do this uh i know it's taking some time but you know it just shows you how much bit of effort it takes uh but essentially uh just because i'm a bit nervous this is taking a little bit more time that i like to um in class i'm pretty fast and i think you will be able to see that in my next example um so let's just you know do this uh and then that should be fine as well and it looks like i made one more uh so once you have that and once you compile it um our document should look brand new and there we go as you can see there once we um use this new uh i guess macro i made called which stanford question um and you can see how it's defined uh again this this a lot of the code is um taken from all sources but i made it more or less mine um you can see that it just looks really nice and then i have essentially just this uh other macro um that allows me to just write up um proofs or like make my proofs look really nice so for example um now and once i kind of have that down um i really just want to write my you know my type of type up my solutions that i wrote in paper to latex um so i i have a lot of snippets and these lipids allow me to do something like this um so if i ever press something like ali adamic converts to um a uh well into this align star environment which is really nice because now i can just uh you know save it and it should compile and look nice um and then another thing i have is um so i use a thing called github copilot and github copilot it's meant for essentially autocompleting and assisting your code um for something like like math it really doesn't work really well like it won't give you a good like a right solution for a proof but it allows you to essentially just skip a lot of the bowler template that you have to write which is nice um so like we were saying like so we are given uh the following um and now we have to prove that uh these polynomials are the basis of um and i don't know what that character is so let's look at it oh yes um and you see that um how do you know really know what the character was but just using the able to tab complete with github copilot allowed me to essentially do that fast um and essentially um in class i have these things well i already have i memorized all my what we call snippets um and let me just show you that real quick um these snippets are are from um this article and essentially uh with this article it really inspired me to uh do this because this person was able to write oh his map like his four years of his math major um in bim and law tech and i was like i can do that too um so he in this tutorial he just kind of goes over uh his snippets um let me see if i can find them uh is his snippet should be somewhere around here i should have gotten this but essentially yeah okay you all these snippets are here and i've been using them because they're really useful uh so just for example if i press e m it automatically lets me go into displayed mode so i can do something like um i can automatically do something like um f is equal to sum of that and so once i just start auto completing um it just really goes fast and i can write something like that in a second uh the other thing that we have right here is especially when you're writing long equations you want to make it look pretty um so once we're in math mode um [Music] the the creator of those snippets really thought about it and he was like we have so many uh things we have to do um so for example in when you're algebra you're mostly gonna have to do something like this so i created a snippet that allows me to essentially just write um [Music] and let me just do display mode allows me to essentially just you know pull up these elements as such uh let's create uh you know a list of vectors and then we have uh something like this um and at one point i had a problem set that expected me to do uh two sorry um to just uh prove that this is true um and as you can see like it just like once you just memorize your snippets and macros it just goes really fast um i'm just not showing it because i'm a bit camera shy but uh here you can start taking a look that i can write um logic extremely fast and it looks really nice um and because of the way i essentially wrote my template um i have you know just for example um just start around that um i have something like this and i can quickly just and let me just turn i'm a bit nervous um but essentially what my template ends up looking like is something like this um once you really just like learn on how to use it um so this is the the proof of the fundamental theorem of linear maps um which you know is a i guess really important and later on since it's called fundamental that has a word fundamental and you can see how nice it really looks um i really spent a lot of times making it through um and you know even my qed is a really smiley face so you can see um it is really useful and so you might be wondering why don't i just hand write everything and as a reminder um i kind of said this at the beginning but the reason is um i've gotten i got into the point where i can actually just write everything down and keep up with my math professor and also be able to think about it um and i can argue that honestly at one point uh with handwriting you're only just writing notes and you also have to like spend a little time to think about it and i can do that by typing as well so it doesn't really affect me and another benefit is especially when i'm writing just notes in class um what i end up seeing is that that this effort is worth it because whenever i go through my problem sets i can literally just go through the definitions um on my pdf um and i because you know this is essentially just typed i can just copy my code um to for a specific you know uh definition or something um so i don't have to keep rewriting a lot of things and i have a lot of like you know boulder plate uh for example uh in my original template um i am a math major but i do some computer science as well um and in my original template uh i'd like a little template for me for to write algorithms and let me just show you how that looks as well this is how like you know an algorithm would look in my temp oh using like you know my customized template and just some customization on this package called algorithm e um which is really nice and yeah that's essentially all i want to show like uh once you have the snippets now once you have like uh these things you're gonna be fast and although it may take a little work uh the fact of the matter is you know there's a bunch of resources uh you can learn online and i have my you know my snippets as well and i have uh everything that i'm using online in my dot files so if you ever just want to take a look at that you're more than welcome to um and all you really have to do is just be able to type and of course do math um and it's just so handy uh because it really like like once you just get really comfortable with it i assure you you're gonna be fast you're gonna be really fast uh especially if you use a texture like them um that allows you to accept essentially just like look at your code and also kind of render it using you know all these symbols it's so nice um so that's all i wanted to talk about hopefully you gain a bit of inspiration um and that was a bit useful sorry for the background noise but yeah that'll be it thank you so much

Channel: SeniorMars

Views: 936,484

Keywords: fast, latex, terminal, vim

Id: DOtM1mrWjUo

Length: 20min 14sec (1214 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 21 2022