Top all-time · #2142
castel.dev
Personal blog · castel.dev/postmathproductivity
castel.dev is a personal blog at castel.dev about math and productivity. Since 2019, 35 different Hacker News readers have linked it 46 times, most often “How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (25) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link castel.dev for Gilles Castel's posts on taking live mathematics lecture notes with LaTeX, Vim, and Inkscape, plus a notes site. Commenters praise the workflow and the site's design.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 25 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim18 people · 18 mentions · first linked 2019-03-20
- I draw figures for my mathematical lecture notes using Inkscape (2019)10 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2019-04-27
- /notes3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-11-07
- Managing my LaTeX lecture notes3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-09-15
- My Mathematics PhD research workflow: LaTeX notes and instant pdf referencing2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-04-10
What Hacker News says?
Nice to see you in the thread ;-) > One of the main problems and trying to solve at the moment is how to write mathematical notation using the tools I have at hand, which is a Mac, Sublime Text and DragonDictate for Mac. Sounds like LaTeX should be an option. When I write LaTeX I use vim and the KDE PDF viewer Okular. When I save the file I let a script compile it and Okular automatically updates when the new PDF fi…
Comment linking /post/lecture-notes-1/
on “What Does a Coder Do If They Can't Type?”Submitted How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim as a story · 703 points
HN discussionYou might want to check out those blog posts: https://castel.dev
Comment linking /
on “Some tiny personal programs I've written”Submitted I draw figures for my mathematical lecture notes using Inkscape as a story · 542 points
HN discussionThis 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
Comment linking /post/lecture-notes-1/
on “Typst: An easy to learn alternative for LaTex”Submitted I draw figures for my mathematical lecture notes using Inkscape (2019) as a story · 312 points
HN discussion> 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 "pro…
Comment linking /post/lecture-notes-3/
on “Inkscape 1.0 Beta 1”Submitted How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim (2019) as a story · 248 points
HN discussionHe'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/
Comment linking /post/lecture-notes-2/
on “Oh shit, my weekend project turned into an App Store Best New App (2018)”Submitted My Mathematics PhD research workflow: LaTeX notes and instant pdf referencing as a story · 236 points
HN discussion> https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-1/ Very nice! Thank you.
Comment linking /post/lecture-notes-1/
on “Writing a Book with Pandoc, Make, and Vim”Submitted Taking notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim (2019) as a story · 233 points
HN discussionA 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 C…
Comment linking /post/lecture-notes-1/
on “Writing a Book with Pandoc, Make, and Vim”Submitted How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim as a story · 9 points
HN discussionThis 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/
Comment linking /post/lecture-notes-1/
on “Why Evernote failed to realize its potential”Submitted I draw figures for my mathematical lecture notes using Inkscape as a story · 6 points
HN discussionTyping 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/
Comment linking /post/lecture-notes-1/
on “Word processors are ditching equation editors in favour of LaTeX”Submitted I draw figures for my mathematical lecture notes using Inkscape (2019) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAccording 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…
Comment linking /post/research-workflow/
on “How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim (2019)”Submitted How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim as a story · 3 points
HN discussionhttps://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-2/ It’s not just Inkscape, it’s well configured Inkscape.
Comment linking /post/lecture-notes-2/
on “How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim (2019)”Submitted How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI 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 mana…
Comment linking /post/lecture-notes-2/
on “How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim (2019)”Submitted Taking lecture notes using LaTeX part 2: Making figures in real time as a story · 3 points
HN discussion>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-op…
Comment linking /post/lecture-notes-2/
on “How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim (2019)”Submitted Managing my LaTeX lecture notes as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI 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?!?!?!? (Footn…
Comment linking /notes
on “How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim (2019)”Submitted How I draw figures for my mathematical lecture notes using Inkscape (2019) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThis one? https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-1/ HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19448678
Comment linking /post/lecture-notes-1/
on “My Mathematics PhD research workflow: LaTeX notes and instant pdf referencing”> 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/lect…
Comment linking /post/lecture-notes-3/
on “Emacs' org-mode gets citation support”
