To keep from distractions and add efficient hotkeys, I use Manjaro i3 minimal. Manjaro kept breaking. I’m now using EndeavourOS Sway which seems to be even lighter and much more reliable/easy to use. Even works with nVidia, though I haven’t tried gaming yet.

For my notes, I use vimtex, installed on gvim, alongside a patched version of zathura-mupdf for updating every time the LaTeX compiles. I use UltiSnips for custom autocompletion with a few snippets. These snippets also help with quick plotting in matplotlib. I use ale so that chktex yells at me every time I use the wrong kind of space or dash. I have a set of macros that I use to make typesetting even faster. Here’s my .vimrc for completeness.

For diagrams, when I’m lazy I use scrcpy, which can either wirelessly or wired-ly connect to an android tablet and screen share over adb. In particular, I use the Onyx BOOX Tab Ultra. I have a titanium nib which surprisingly doesn’t scratch this paper-feel film. When I’m not lazy, I use Inkscape, and when I’m very not lazy, I use PGF/TikZ.

eInk tablets are particularly nice for reading and annotating documents/papers/textbooks, and keeping handwritten notes (although I’ve mostly supplanted this last need with VimTex). I use zotero as a reference manager.

I’ve started doing simple CAS in Symbolics.jl and use units whenever I need to do quick computations in non-natural units.

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