People often talk about the speed of use, but this is (IMO) a result of its efficiency. I liked your use of the word 'relaxed', I'd add: slow down your actions so you have time to think about what you're doing, almost like narrating your actions.
Vim has a grammar that works well when spoken. Learn Vim's way of saying the action you're performing, then learn the relevant keys, adding them to your vocabulary. If a sentence makes sense in your head, try it and it'll probably work as expected. Say you started with:
"delete 3 words" == d3w
"yank to the end of the line" == y$
From this you could assume these valid:
"delete to the end of the line" == d$
"yank 5 words" == y5w
It takes time, but it builds up when you add a word to your vocab here and there, when you have a concrete use for it. (often one you'll remember from the 'wow, that was cool' moment when you first see it in action)
"delete inside quotes" == di"
"select all of the block" == va{
This isn't a reflection on its state now, but I'm trying to make the point that good software takes time. They've had 13 years to clean it up now, and evidently it's gotten a lot better. But that's worth remembering when judging the crap software that's come out in the last couple years.
Linux printing also used to absolutely suck, so much that CUPS was generally synonymous with the hassles you (used to) need to go through to do practical work with a Linux system. Ubuntu has been an absolute godsend in terms of getting a stable, productive Linux desktop working.
I realize a lot of that is riding on the Debian team, but Canonical has done some fantastic work just testing the thing out on such a wide variety of configurations. It's the distribution I recommend to any of my friends looking to try Linux out for the first time.
Notepad++ used to cheese me off in a previous job where I was basically forced to use it because it couldn't even draw drop-down menus correctly. Ugh. Terrible UI.
I used latex to write a paper for the first time last week, and while i thoroughly enjoyed it, i'm fairly confident there were lots of things I could've done better.
The second most important thing I've found for latex is setting up macros. In TextExpander/AHK I have several dozen Latex macros set up, like
\tbl3 => \begin{tabular}{ l | c | r }
a & b & c \\
\end{tabular}
while inotifywait *.tex; do sleep 0.2 && pdflatex main.tex && killall -HUP mupdf; done
The only annoyance is that big .tex files (esp. Beamer presentations) may take long to compile, which interrupts the flow. But in that case, it helps to distribute the sources into multiple files and to comment out the source files that are not needed at the moment.
I used latexmk which watches file(s) for changes and rebuilds with pdflatex. It was nice, but made my laptop run real hot, and inotify never really works very well.
Which ST plugin do you use?
PDFLaTeX makes it incredibly easy to keep all your graphics in PDF files; it makes them so much nicer to deal with. Inkscape is great for making vector graphics for use in LaTex; keep the source code of the graphics in SVG but save as PDF for LaTeX to use (tell Inkscape to export only the drawing to PDF, not the whole page, and you'll never have to crop or resize your graphics ever again).
Finally, use a modern TeX like XeTeX that directly understands Unicode characters and TrueType fonts.
Import as .pdf not .svg? Got it. It was tricky fiddling with percentages and stuff to get the .svg to fit properly (and look decent).
Thanks! I'll look into XeTex.
http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2010/02/15/lets-le...
I'm not affiliated in any way with that site but the pedagogy is very approachable. Also it helps to use a site like WriteLatex.com or ShareLatex.com to do the hard setting up part when you're just starting out.
Edit: I see he is no longer a helpdesk guy, and his blog's tagline is (unfortunately) no longer "I will not fix your computer."
I'm not sure there is really a wrong way to use it. If you google every little thing to find a good solution (not manually inserting and formatting references for example), I don't think there is too much to be done better. At least, to my beginner's eyes it doesn't seem like it.
The latter is something i achieved with sleep_until_modified.sh and a shell loop. Pretty rudimentary but functionally equivalent to modern webdev reload-on-write behavior. HUGELY beneficial to my learning latex syntax and behavior and formatting nuances
[1] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa3...
I can reliably ssh into pretty much any server and use default vim. I cannot rely on a given plugin to be installed on the server. The more you customize vim, the less universal your knowledge of vim becomes. It's not a big deal to learn some plugins, but it is worth bringing up if people are talking about the ubiquity of it.
It couldn't even open a 1.2 GB text file when I tried it yesterday. On a 32GB system. Seriously?
Left to over 30 years of growth outside of its intended use case, LaTeX proper does nothing you would need it to, and the packages that you use with it are horribly fragmented. Maybe Latex is good at the things it sets out to implement, but those things aren't what I or anyone else uses it for (creating publication-quality documents). So in considering latex we are forced to also consider the environment of libraries it exists in.
LaTeX brings all the problems you had in the Windows 2000 era of programming into document creation. All your favorites like misleading compiler messages, dependency hell, choosing a compiler, knowing whether or not you have run the compiler enough times to produce a final document (!!!), bad compile environments, inconsistent naming, inconsistent syntax for passing parameters to library calls (!!!), GOTOs.
There is no way to write semantic latex for most documents where you would need it. Here's a fun project: find a way to reference the same footnote or endnote multiple times throughout a document in a way consistent with how you reference anything else (that is, using \label and \ref). Some arcane technicality in the way the counter is set up prevents you from doing this. Instead, you have to create your own global counter, write a function to maintain it, then use this function in lieu of LaTeX's implementation of footnotes.
Every time I want to do anything other than add words to my document, I have to think about whether I want to use Latex's meager facilities, facilities that I had to write, or facilities that someone else invented, then worry about all the quirks in them. If I want to add a table to my document, I need to decide whether it should be a `tabular', `tabular* ' `tabularx', `align', `array', `eqnarray', or `matrix'. Someone has told me once that one of these is very bad and should be avoided unless absolutely necessary, although he didn't tell me why, and I don't remember which one. If I want to make a cell span two columns, I have to remember whether that is the `multicols' package, or the `multicolumn' package. If my table gets too big, I now have to hard-code a split myself, or repeat the entire process and convert my table to a `longtable'. I hope I don't have to wrap anything in a `minipage'.
It baffles me that thinking about these things is prerequisite to creating a document.
The attitude that 'LaTeX is easy' is perpetrated loudly by people that haven't had to use LaTeX very much. It is only tentatively saved by the comprehensive (sometimes, if you're lucky, even readable) documentation of all its quirks.
I am not going to stop using Latex, but no one will ever get me to say that it's easy.
On the other hand, I don't know another environment that makes it as easy as LaTeX makes it. Markdown is easier but far from powerful enough; HTML is nowhere near as easy and just not really made for it; and WYSIWYG editors just suck as a whole. LaTeX seemed to me as everything I was looking for, even if the syntax and methods are from the eighties.
Additionally, enough people use it that support is also not an issue. There are almost certainly other languages that do a similar job in a modern way, but the thing is, my girlfriend studies math and she can read/write these documents too. The network effect works in LaTeX' favor here.
Linux: Most tools of course, as they are made with the Unix philosophy, but these days I'm most surprised by print drivers for Linux. Where in Windows the printer is always magically offline or slow, from Linux I can print and scan very reliably.
Vim is also worth learning, it makes editing much more... relaxed I guess. No longer have to move your mouse to the arrow keys or even the mouse/touchpad to scroll or select. It also helps that it exists on nearly every Unix system you'll ever connect to.
And finally I recently discovered LaTeX, which could be described as markdown on steroids. A little more difficult to get into, but it's easy to create professional documents and have a plain text source (which works nicely with git and other unix tools). If you have trouble getting started in LaTeX, ask me (comment here or see my profile), I also didn't know how to get started for a while.
Edit: Another Windows tool is Notepad++. I have not seen the likes in Linux when it comes to robustness. It has all the basics you need for handling any sort of file that involves manual editing, binary or plain text. If there is no binary editor available for your file of choice, or if you just want to have a quick peak, Notepad++ will do just fine. Beware of really huge files, although I have seen it handle some big things on low RAM machines too.