[adamisntdead]

I'm currently a mathematics undergraduate at Cambridge and there's quite a few students who live type notes in various different formats. I think that the majority of the learning curve comes when getting used to the format of writing in LaTeX, and once you have that down (so that typing both prose and mathematics takes little to no effort) you can type notes faster than you can write them - with the small exception of maybe matrices and certain advanced things which slow you down.

The benefit of having typed notes at least for me come from being able to search, having a good record of my own understanding of a course and also not having to rely on keeping handwritten notes safe. They also look pretty which is a bonus for studying from them.

Examples:

- Analysis I (which have been edited): https://adamkelly.me/files/ia-analysis-i/analysis-i.pdf

- Graph Theory (not edited but diagrams added): https://adamkelly.me/files/ii-graph-theory/graph-theory.pdf

As a side note, one other thing I do is write short 'handouts' on topics that I think I have something to say about. For example https://adamkelly.me/files/handouts/direct-products/direct-p....

[teruakohatu]

I am always in awe of people like you. I have no idea how someone can type \frac{}{} faster than I can draw a horizontal line (while listening to a lecturer), but I believe you.

Meanwhile I use Onenote. I don't have to worry about keeping notes safe, or the stress of trying to type at warpspeed. I would go with a Remarkable tablet but now with subscription pricing it's a non starter.

[tobmlt]

Latex specific ide \frac and auto fill. You can for sure get speedy with practice!

Those beautiful graphs now… I ended up using secondary programs to gen images (pdf or whatever) of graphs and such for latex to bring in the usual way. Not as good!

[vitus]

My recollection is that the main speed advantage lay in being able to copy-paste the previous line when working through a derivation.

I live-LaTeXed notes for a couple of years in undergrad but eventually went back to pen + paper (approximately all my assignments continued to be typeset, though).

[tobmlt]

Great stuff! I am in awe of your beautifully done graphs.

For speed with, e.g. matrices like you say, but also more specialized course specific notation, could you build a set of quick functions for the topic of the day to aid note taking?

If set up your environment just so, you can repurpose really simple commands like the slash in “\this” to do some common but annoying thing like bold upright lettering or underbars or something. (I actually need to go look at latex to be sure what all you could make maximally parsimonious… it’s been a while and I mostly copy and paste my old commands around. Anyway, you probably already do this kind of thing.