How to use TW for college math notes? (beginner)

[Evžen Wybitul]

Hey,

I'm revising my note-taking system for the next semester. Initially I planned to use simple Markdown files, maybe with some tags added, but I can see that TW could be better for my use case — I'm a math major and I could use some modular definition/theorem Tiddlers that could be interlinked and tagged, rather than searching for them in individual markdown files. I have a question, though:

How should I start?

There's so many different plugins, saving schemes, different servers, themes... Is there any TW that would skip all the hassle and come with (the most important) batteries included? And which are those "batteries" anyway? I don't want to miss out on something great just because I don't know I need it. The question could be phrased differently:

How would you take college/class/meeting notes with TW? Which plugins, which workflow? And how would you review the notes later?

I'm sorry, I didn't manage to find the info I'm looking for here in this group, nor on the internet. Thank you for your help.

[Mohammad]

Hi Evzen,

I am sure you will get more comments here. But I think if you teach Math you need the KaTeX plugin.

So, for start and as minimum you need to have download Empty.html from tiddlywiki.com and then add

the KaTeX plugin from control panel / plugins / Get more plugins

I may also recommend shiraz plugin (https://kookma.github.io/Shiraz/) if you need to add colorful elements in your notes

like alerts, footnotes, ... or want to create sequential tiddlers (a story a slideshow)

Cheers

Mohammad

[Mohammad]

Further input

Take look at David Gifford wonderful TW resources at

https://dynalist.io/d/zUP-nIWu2FFoXH-oM7L7d9DM#q=math

Cheers

Mohammad

[passingby]

Hey,

Have a look at Timimi plugin for saving on laptop. It was just updated and the new update is for firefox but not for chrome. But the older release works fine for me on chrome. You just have to install it as a developer extension for now, which does not bother me much. 

And for android phone, I would suggest use noteself. Just like timimi, it makes saving feel smooth and automatic. You can save noteself as an app on the phone and even have multiple notebooks in the same file. 

In the now famous words of Eddie Bravo," Look into it" :-) 

[TonyM]

A note on evolution in tiddlywiki,

I have done class notes in tiddlywiki for a non maths course, but remember that using a single file wiki, copy or use backups at every step then you can just continue to grow, evolve, customise your wiki as you go along.

When studying bigdata I added an sql syntax section, stored aws scripts, commands and snapshots. Much of this came after I started responding to the material, and in many ways provided revision and set me up to be more productive in class. Not to mention create flashcards from tiddlers.

Think outside any box or tiddler you come accross. Evolve your solution as needed.

Regards
Tony

[TonyM]

Evžen,

I would also add explore tiddlywiki for basic features that will help you while in class or studying

I use lines beginning with colon and semi-colon a lot

;Question
:answer
;Heading
:notes

Use triple back ticks for code blocks and triple double quotes for blocks of text that do not demand additional line breaks, good for pasting

Perhaps build your own css for shortcuts

;.q use the class q for question with a color

:.a use the class q for answers

And more...

Regards

Tony

[TonyM]

Evžen,

Please find attached a tiddler I extracted from a bigger solution I have built but not published. Download this file and drag to a test wiki, It will add some icons to the view template to allow you to toggle view edit and Fold/unfold.

If you edit tiddlers this way (From the view Template), every key stroke is saved on the current tiddler, but the autosave of the whole wiki will not occur. This can help for "in class" note taking. 

The editor used and the editor Toolbar buttons vary according to Tiddler Type. But folding the tiddler you can avoid displaying the content while you type for a more rapid entry.

You could wrap the code in this tiddler in a list or reveal to only display in particular cases. eg tiddlers [!is[system}] or has a particular tag eg note.

Regards

Tony

On Thursday, 3 January 2019 02:42:49 UTC+11, Evžen Wybitul wrote:

[TonyM]

Now attached 

[Chuck R.]

You will probably need to learn some form of Latex in order to see your complex equations with special symbols correctly. Typical markdown doesn't support that. Markua markdown might. But I don't know if TW supports Markua in any way.

[jwd]

A couple suggestions from someone who has used TW for class and project note taking:

1. Keep it simple - don't spend so much time tweaking TW with plugins and making your note taking tool super powerful that you lose sight of the primary goal of taking class notes. I have found tweaking TW can be quite a (pleasurable) time sink and I have more than once taken my eye off the reason I was using TW in the first place. Be wary of falling into that trap.
   
2. Backup, backup, backup - you don't want to find at exam time that something you changed mid semester corrupted content in some way.

FWIW I evolved over a dozen+ years from TWC to now using the TiddlyServer / separate external tid files maintained in multiple Git repos approach, with a minimum of plugins. That might not be an approach for someone just starting.

[Evžen Wybitul]

This is exactly what I'm afraid of. I don't want to spend hours of going through every plugin I find potentially useful, only to later find out I actually don't need 90% of them. However, I wouldn't like to miss any plugins which would make my life n-times easier... Could you share some of your experience? Which plugins do you use/would you recommend for taking notes?

Also, could you write up some more about how you to use TW with git? That is exactly what I would like to do as well.

[Riz]

Which OS are you using?

[Evžen Wybitul]

MacOS

[Evžen Wybitul]

(and, sidenote, I already know how to work with git itself. But TW's default workflow includes downloading a whole file everytime a TW gets saved, which doesn't look like it's made for git per se)

[Luca Dorigo]

Hi there,

I've been doing just this for the past year. TW is a wonderful tool for the purpose, but it does need some tweaking in order to be usable as live notetaking.

Here are some tips:

* Use the node version of TW. Preferably storing it on dropbox or some cloud provider so you don't want to kill yourself the day your HDD fails and you loose 3 months of work (been there)

* You need the KaTeX plugin for typesetting math equations

* Get a powerful keyboard-macro program (on macOS I am using https://www.keyboardmaestro.com/main/, most well-spent 30$ of the year) and define keyboard shortcuts for common latex symbols and structures. That is your only hope of entering math equations fast enough. Chorded shortcuts (that involve more than one combination of keys) are especially helpful to organize shortcuts in an easy to remember way.

For instance, `cmd-l + l` writes the KaTeX delimiters and positions the cursor between them:

$$

$$

`cmd-l + k` starts listening for greek symbols input: whatever character I press next is converted to the corresponding greek symbol in latex. Ex:

t -> \theta
T (shift-t) -> \Theta
w -> \omega
d -> \delta
D (shift-t) -> \Delta
alt-d -> \partial (delta used in partial derivatives)
etc.

`cmd-l + w` starts listening for triggers for "wrapping" latex expressions, and positions the cursor at the right spot:

i -> \int_{}^{} , positions the cursor inside the first set of brackets
s -> \sin\left(  \right), positions the cursor after the "("
a -> \begin{aligned}  \end{aligned} , for blocks of several equations

There's a lot more, those are just some examples. This allows me to write latex equations/notes extremely fast, and is the only way I found to keep up the pace of a lecture.

* Write a script or find some way to speedup the image import process. That's something I complained about several times before here, inserting images is sooo clunky in TW and completely disrupts the notetaking flow.

With a combination of the keyboard shortcut program above and some bash scripting, I now have a keyboard shortcut that allows me to capture a screenshot of the area I need, save it in the TW folder with a random name, generate the corresponding .meta tiddly file, and put the corresponding  `[img[img_name]]` in my clipboard so that I can paste it inside my tiddly. It now takes me less than a second to insert images in my notes.

* Define some tiddlywiki macros for stuff like "definition", "example", "important", etc. an associate them to keyboard shortcuts so you can take structured notes without losing too much time for it.

* Find the right level of "graining" for your tiddly's. I initially split my notes into very, very small chunks (tiddlys) but I found that to be counter-productive. My heuristic is now "will I ever need to link to this concept on its own ?" . If yes, it goes into a tiddly. Otherwise, just include inside the "parent" tiddly.

That's what comes to mind now.

If you work on macOS, feel free to message me, I will be happy to send you the macros/scripts that I have.

[Mark S.]

Re entering equations. You could enter them as images freehand, and then transcribe them later. I would worry that entering them as latex would introduce errors and/or slow the note process.

-- Mark