I have started the practice of live-texing my math/physics notes. Although I am not practicising it in a live-lecture, I am doing it for the online lectures I am viewing to get fast and accustomed to it. I am not a pro touch typer, but have a decent speed of about 60 wpm. Some of the tricks I have used are to use lots of \newcommand
to ease it down.
Most helpful would be something to substitute equation delimiters that do not involve pressing a dead key. For various reasons (portability to an online CMS) I have begun using \(..\)
instead of $..$
the former involves six key strokes and the latter involves three. For the display mode the former style involves four keystrokes while the latter involves five. I would like to accomplish that in a single keystroke. What keyboard shortcuts can I set, or is there something I can do within latex?
Similarly, is it possible to have one keystroke for {
,}
,_
,^
etc?
At present I ignore the delimiters when the lecturer is going really fast, and after the lecture have an extremely buggy and ugly tex file which I have to edit. I would like to have as finished a file as possible. Normal sentences do not pose much of a problem, but the math is slowing me down. I would prefer not to download another keyboard though.
Best Answer
If you're using a good enough editor, you can set up all sorts of things to happen with a single keystroke. For example, I use xemacs, and I have
plus a few other things. To get out of them, I have alt-j (or escape-j) "jump out" of any of these, i.e., it moves forward until after the first right paren, right brace, or right bracket. I also have the key
^
insert that character along with a pair of braces and put point inside the braces, the key_
insert that character along with a pair of braces and put point inside the braces, and the key[
insert a pair of brackets and put point in between them.I set this all up in my
.xemacs/init.el
file; I'll append the relevant part of that file here.