The following provides a very lightweight way to keep a math journal. Within one keystroke you can start typing, and a file for that day will be automatically created. In another keystroke you can view a compiled version of your whole math journal. The philosophy behind this is that you should have a home to jot down thoughts instantly, and the tech behind it should enable you to do it without navigating directories, creating files, including them in a master file, etc. --- all of that is handled in the back end.
- Clone this repository or download the files into a directory. Remember the path to this directory!
- Go into the master file
journal.texand look at line 12:
\def\startyear{2024}
Change this value to whatever year it currently is when you're starting the journal.
- There are two shell scripts --- the first one is
edit-journal.sh. This goes through and checks whether a file exists for today. If it does, it opens it in your favorite text editor. Open up this file and look at line three:
open -a MacVim $TARGETFILE
Replace "MacVim" with whatever application you use to type LaTeX (note --- you don't need this application to be able to compile LaTeX, that will be handled by the next shell script)
- The other shell script is
view-journal.sh. This compiles thejournal.texfile and opens the pdf. The second line says
open -a Skim journal.pdf
and you can replace "Skim" with whatever your pdf viewer of choice is.
So in order to start typing, you want to run these shell scripts. You can do this usually by double-clicking on the shell script file and opening it in a terminal. You may have to change the permissions on the files to allow this.
If you set up Keyboard Cowboy or a similar such program, you can set a key command to trigger the shell files!
Replace /path/to/directory with the absolute path (from the root) to where you're keeping this files, and set a keyboard command you like. For instance I hit ctrl-e when doing anything on my computer, and it opens the tex file for today in the math journal and I can start editing. Doing ctrl-v runs the shell script view-journal.sh and I can view my journal.
The master file is journal.tex. When you download it, there will be almost nothing in it, just enough to get the journal running. It loads the package pgffor in order to run the for loops to load files for each day, so make sure you have this installed.
This project was inspired by Gilles Castel's workflow. His vision for wielding coding to improve the daily life of a mathematics student or research mathematician was amazing. His blog posts were friendly and easy to read, and invited a lot of us to enter the world of live-tex'ing and digitizing our workflow. Rest in peace ✝️