Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ckunte 259 days ago
With the wisdom from a TU Delft graduate student, I switched from Word to LaTeX in 2007, having never known or used it ever before, and never looked back for the next seventeen years. Using it within the corp. environ. (Shell) became progressively harder as time went by due to the need to install such a large installation (under Cygwin, which itself got on the list of not-allowed, and had to resort to `setup-x86_64.exe --no-admin` for nearly all my subsequent time there).

While I appreciate LaTeX structure, and the resulting end product (Knuth is God), it is as you know highly verbose in markup, thereby making the content somewhat unclean, and not easily readable like plain text (my yardstick on content readability and re-usability). I wrote multiple plug-ins for the text editors of my choice Sublime Text, and Vim to produce snippets for writing ease.

- https://github.com/ckunte/latex-snippets-st

- https://github.com/ckunte/latex-snippets-vim

Switched to Typst cautiously in 2023, and have never since looked back. If LaTeX was the gold standard for the 20th century, I think Typst is on track to become that for the 21st.

I wrote a little note about writing a template for Typst to remind myself how-to, and for anyone I'm working with:

- https://ckunte.net/2025/template