Taking My University Course Computer Science Notes in LaTeX

How I use my XPS 15 with Linux, Vim, and TeX Live/Pandoc to take high-quality notes that will last forever

My Background

I’m a first-year computer science student at the University of Southampton, England. I don’t like taking notes on paper. For my A-levels, I used my Note 8 with its stylus to take my notes.

I tend to lose my paper notes or spill things on them, leading to me rewriting them which becomes counter-productive really quickly.

Writing my notes on a laptop allows me to access them anywhere, anytime. I can also go back to them in five to ten years if I forget something, without having to keep thick folders with old paper notes. I’m also much faster at typing (95+ wpm) than I am at writing (approximately 15 wpm).

I spent a lot of time at the start of this semester on the internet trying to find the best solution for a computer science student to take notes and I think I finally settled on the best solution for me.

LaTeX and Markdown

I realized that I can split my notes into two different categories; those that require complex mathematical equations/figures, and those that don’t.

For the latter, Markdown would be a better choice, as it can also include code snippets. However LaTeX is much better if we are doing things with vectors, more complex equations, or simply want to do some document alignment.

There are many great solutions for writing LaTeX and Markdown that do all the setting-up for you, including:

• Notable
• Dropbox paper
• Feel free to leave a comment with any other alternatives, I’ll make sure to include them in the list.

However, after giving the above solutions a try, there was always something missing; theming, exporting files, offline support, and LaTeX blocks.

My Workflow

For taking notes with a lot of maths and algebra but not much code (if at all), I use TeX Live to compile my LaTeX notes written in Vim and I view the resulting PDF in real-time with…