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Comment by shuntress | Hacker News Reader

I have spent probably too much time trying to gain a comfortable level of proficiency with LaTex and I have not been able too. Maybe I just don't use it often enough but I always now find myself just using HTML/CSS instead. Even when the thing I'm laying out is specifically just something to be printed.

I feel similarly about LaTeX and Vim. I like them. They are interesting. I appreciate the history around their development and use. But I just cannot convince myself they are worth learning.

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The issue with latex is that I don't personally use it every day, and I suspect many people are in that camp. When you just use it ocassionally, all that syntax just falls out of your brain, leading to a frustrating loop where you're constantly relearning latex.

In comparison, I use vim keybindings every day. As a result, despite how esoteric it may be, it's well ingrained into my muscle memory.

I feel your struggle. Especially for these cases, I am always writing my own personal documentation (recently switched to .org files for that, which makes navigation pretty convenient in Emacs). It seems redundant since you can find all this knowledge on the web (or ask an AI), but my selection, the context and examples I add and how I organize it makes it especially useful for me when I come back later and need to remember what I have learned.

If you need to share a professional document that involves mathematical expressions and equations, LaTeX is very helpful as a tool to use. The need arises if you are a professional or student registered in a course in mathematics or computer science. It's much easier to type multiple lines of equations, with the equation signs aligned, in LaTeX than in Word.

It's a bit of a grind, but you can learn the fundamentals of LaTeX in less than a week if you have an hour a day. It was actually a requirement to learn LaTeX well enough to submit a basic report within 1-2 weeks, as part of a first-year computer science course at the University of Toronto.

The course instructors provided a basic LaTeX template (which included some instructions as a guide to how LaTeX worked), and also linked to free online tutorials for more in-depth instructions, which included LaTeX Tutorial from memory, at https://www.latex-tutorial.com . I wrote out notes from articles 01-09 and a few others on the website (as the other articles were less relevant to my purposes) to learn the basics, and then reinforced and developed my understanding of how to use LaTeX by writing future assignments in the course with it.

As an illustration for how LaTeX solves a nice problem, a recent popular submission on HN explored the complexity of typesetting a mathematical document (named "How did Dennis Ritchie produce his PhD thesis? A typographical mystery"): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35177110 . You might not have as much of a need to learn LaTeX if you don't regularly share lots of mathematical equations, but it's relatively quick to learn. LaTeX has also been quite useful to me for writing a professionally-formatted resume, which has been much easier to update than when I formatted my resume using Word.

I used LaTeX in school too and I agree theres probably no better tool for math-heavy documents.

I stopped using it for my resume because I was too frustrated with essentially re-learning latex basics every time I wanted to make minor changes to content or format.

Yeah for math stuff I loved LaTeX. I even solved large equations directly in the document, was so easy to read.

But once I had to write some pseudocode, make some larger tables, or embed images I suddenly longed for Word. Word certainly can make me curse, but it was still far easier than getting that done in LaTeX.

> It's much easier to type multiple lines of equations, with the equation signs aligned, in LaTeX than in Word.

I actually disagree. The equation editor in word is really quite good (if a little laggy sometimes), once you learn the shortcuts. Being able to see your fractions laid out properly is a massive productivity boost, and makes it much easier to quickly find the part you want to edit. The dealbreaker for me is the lack of equation numbering, without doing quite a few hacks.

Personally, I'd still take the LyX math editor over Word though, for the macros and better performance.

> I have spent probably too much time trying to gain a comfortable level of proficiency with LaTex and I have not been able too.

I got quite comfortable with LaTeX after I read a book. For me it was the Kopka & Daly book. Maybe these days it's a bit old-fashioned to get familiar with a programming language, by reading a book? But I think it works.

https://www.latex-project.org/help/books/

You can develop muscle memory for vim, less so with LaTeX. Vim motions are absolutely worth learning, even if you don't use vim itself - it is the most efficient way to navigate and manipulate text.

My main problem with vim is navigating and manipulating files rather than text.

I use vim fairly frequently for quick edits and small changes but as soon as the scope of the change starts to span more than one file vim starts to feel really frustrating really fast (to me).

Well, if you learn Vim you will use it every day (if you ever program, or work with any markup). And that's even if you never open the Vim editor itself; the bindings are available everywhere.

Vim is pretty easy to remember though, LaTex is something entirely different.

That's fascinating. I genuinely believe you, but in my personal experience, I've felt the opposite way.

A first-year computer science course I took required all the students to develop a basic understanding of LaTeX in 1-2 weeks, and we used LaTeX the rest of the term. I then got used to LaTeX commands, because in my personal experience, I've had plenty of opportunities as part of coursework to use LaTeX (oftentimes, it was required). In the meantime, I haven't yet learned Vim because I've read that it takes a while to learn—at least four weeks of consistent practice, often even longer, e.g. according to this discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15414544

For myself, as someone without personal experience using Vim, LaTeX is essential to my work with commands that I've internalized, whereas Sublime Text and IDEs like Visual Studio Code and PyCharm have been great for editing code (though I recognize that Vim can be an essential tool for editing remote files). I'm curious to learn from others about why Vim can be a better tool for certain tasks, even for local files, in contrast to Sublime or IDEs.

> Vim can be an essential tool for editing remote files

Even this point is being weakened by how good vscode's remote editing support is.

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