Because naively writing papers in TeX on a desktop has a lot of lame steps and tricks. This is where we get into the nitty gritty of terminal tools. So basically the more seamless integration it has with services I use, the better.Ĭaveats: Integration comes at a premium of $8/month for students, and $15/month for non-students. It seems like many of these services are viewed by their creators as a complete replacement for offline work, when really (for me) it’s a temporary substitute that needs to operate seamlessly with my other services. How it could improve: Better vim command support. The point is that ShareLaTeX having Github integration is forward thinking and makes ShareLaTeX more attractive. I have lots of ideas for how Github could improve academics’ lives and the lives of the users of their research, too many to list here without derailing the post. The way people store and “archive” their work is horrendous, and everyone can agree a waste of time. Github integration. Though literally no mathematicians I know use Github for anything related to research, I think that with the right features Github could become the “right” solution to paper management. They don’t support vim-style word-wrapping (gq), and they leave out things like backward search (? instead of /) and any : commands you tend to use. Vim commands. The problem is that they don’t go far enough here. Other than that, ShareLaTeX (like Overleaf) has tons of templates, all the usual libraries, great customer support, and great collaborative features for the once in a blue moon that someone else uses ShareLaTeX. This causes me to use a bunch of symbolic links that would be annoying to duplicate if I got a new machine. The only caveat is that ShareLaTeX only accesses Dropbox files that are in a specially-named folder. ShareLaTeX (unlike Overleaf) has seamless Dropbox integration. You cannot expect them to sign up for online services just to work with you.Īwesome features: Dropbox integration! This is crucial, because I (and everyone I know) does their big collaborative projects using Dropbox. I generally do not need collaboration services, because the de facto standard among everyone I’ve ever interacted with is that you can only expect people to have Dropbox. Basically I need a browser replacement for a desktop LaTeX setup. Needs support for figures, bibliographies, the whole shebang. Mindset: An editor I can use on my Chromebook or a public machine, yet still access my big papers and projects in progress. They’re both pretty solid, but a few features tip me toward ShareLaTeX. I’ve used a bunch of online TeX editors, most notably Overleaf (formerly WriteLaTeX). I would find the service significantly less useful if I could not export to pdf. Right now I embolden the Theorem and italicize the Proof., and end with a tombstone $ \square$ on a line by itself. I don’t see a simple way to make a theorem/proof environment with minimal typing, but it does occur to me as an inefficiency the less time I can spend highlighting and formatting things the better.Ĭaveats: Additional features, such as exporting from StackEdit to pdf requires you to become a donor ($5/year, a more than fair price for the amount I use it). Also some special support for (and shortcuts for) theorem/proof styling would be nice, but not necessary. Any other workflow besides Markdown with TeX support is just awfully slow, because the boilerplate of LaTeX proper involves so much typing (\begin, maybe?). In class notes: where I need to type fast and can sacrifice on prettiness.These are documents for which you have no figures, don’t want to keep track of sections and theorem numbering, and have no serious bibliography. Mindset: somewhere in between writing an email with one or two bits of notation (just write TeX source and hope they can read it) and writing a document that needs to look good. I haven’t found a better tool than StackEdit. At home I run OS X Mavericks (10.9.5), and I carry a Chromebook with me to campus and when I travel. Here’s what I use.įirst, my general setup. I’ve arrived at what I feel is a stable state. Be it lecture notes, papers, or blog posts, I think in the last two years I’ve typed vastly more dollar signs (TeX math mode delimiters) than in the rest of my life combined. As is the natural inclination for most programmers, I’ve tried lots of different ways to optimize my workflow and minimize the amount of typing, configuring, file duplicating, and compiler-wrestling I do in my day-to-day routine. Over the last year or so I’ve gradually spent more and more of my time typing math.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |