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Comment by efficax | Hacker News Reader

What can you not do with a grid of characters exactly?

I think we're seeing a culture clash between people who come from a computing background where the terminal was either not used at all, or was a second class citizen, and people who come from a background where a terminal is the main way to interact with the system and the GUI is relegated to mostly showing terminals and doing the GUI-oriented tasks that can't be easily accomplished in the terminal, like pixel-image editing and drawing.

Edit natural language documents without wasting about 1/4 of your screen width on useless column alignment information.

Nicely formatted math. Gui designers. Diagrams.

And personally I find tabs is the most efficient design for switching between files.

> Nicely formatted math.

Can you elaborate? With a keystroke, it renders a LaTeX formula inline.

Oh nice! I guess it's less limited than I thought!

this could sway me, as a novice, whats the mininum amount of steps (from necessary packages to install to actual inline math output o screen) to demonstrate this?

First, the proper way would be to use the appropriate mode for LaTeX (auctex). It has a keybinding.

I don't use that mode, though, do I can't tell you how to set it up. I use org-mode, which lets you embed LaTeX formulae. I use this often, but surprisingly am not seeing anything in my Emacs config for this, so it may work out of the box. You do need some packages installed on your machine (dvipng, latex, etc). I already had them installed, so for me it was a simple matter of the keybinding: C-c C-x C-l

Details from the manual:

https://orgmode.org/manual/Previewing-LaTeX-fragments.html

Perhaps a friendlier guide:

https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org-latex-preview.htm...

If you're not familiar with org-mode, it is highly recommended. Its learning curve is quite shallow. I'm sure there are tutorials out there, but for me the Google Tech Talk was enough to get me started and convince me I should use it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJTwQvgfgMM

Ever since I encountered org mode, I author everything with it: LaTeX, HTML, DOC files, etc.

thanks, that worked, I was down the auctex rabbit hole, and got stuck on a 'cannot load file... cdlatex' or some such...

C-c C-x C-l worked out of box!

Weird, once I have C-cxl'ed a fragment to rendered latex, and the C-cc'ed back to monospace, I am no longer able to insert superscript and subscript symbols, and it complains about cdlatex-superscript or cdlatex-sub-superscript...

cdlatex likely is very useful if you plan to edit a lot of formulae. org has its own org-cdlatex minor mode (also needs effort to set up).

reinstalled the org package restarted emacs, and now it works

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