Foreword

Inspired by this post on Reddit on someone else’s workflow, I decided to kick things up a notch and bring even more of the similar ideas on board. There will be many parts of which may take a lot of effort to emulate, but hopefully this in-depth plunge into my setup can give you ideas on how you can make your own experience of using and writing in LaTeX more enjoyable.

This is not your tutorial to how to use LaTeX. I do not proclaim myself a pro at LaTeX at this point, and so I do not think I am eligible to write a even an introductory passage to using LaTeX. You are free to ask me how to do certain things and I’ll gladly answer them to the best of my abilities or point you to the right resources.

Due to how I use my computer and the nature of my setup, here are some knowledge that I expect the reader to know or be familiar with before delving forward.

• familiarity with the command line (cli) and terminal environment is required; and
• basic familiarity with how LaTeX and TeXLive works;
• basic familiarity with regular expressions (pattern matching and groups);
• already have TeX installed on your system.

It has been slightly more than I year that I have started using $LaTeX$. As I gain familiarity with the typesetting language over this time, I have also gained more confidence in dealing with its package management and locations of its files and folders. Now, I have a workflow and environment that I am relatively happy with.

I’m not someone that can really hide my excitement at seeing beautifully crafted setups; my last post about ncmpcpp is a proof of that. Well, sort of. I’ve dreamed of having my own setup for the longest time, although it is only until recently that I started to pay more attention to automation tools and tiling window managers. Of course, there are no tiling window managers that work natively on macOS, but that does not stop the community from coming up with ways to achieve that, giving birth to tools like Amethyst and Hammerspoon. I’ve used both for some time, didn’t really get attached to Amethyst, and Hammerspoon can only do so much with window management, although I still use Hammerspoon for that nice emoji selector.

I have long developed the habit of keeping handwritten notes for my studies. Even today, I still hold onto my notes for Calculus from more than 3 years ago. But as I continue on further, it does seem more and more cumbersome to bring all of my finalized hard copies with me to wherever I move, even more so with my current nomadic lifestyle, switching between Co-op jobs and studies every term. And so I have decided to give $\LaTeX$ a try.