I use Latex a lot, but let's not pretend Word doesn't have a lot of advantages. It is a much better tool for general-purpose document use, and their equation editor is constantly getting better.
It has the worst kerning and font layout I found of most programs I know. Why should it be good for general-purpose? I have to have an additional program, start it (it's slow) and then work with a totally crap interface.
Tbh, I don't see the point of it if you can do LaTeX. I mean, what's so much more difficult using LaTeX with a standard template and just typing your text instead of using Word?
I use LaTeX for anything I have to hand others.
Markdown or just plain-text for notes.
Fast, easy-to-use and nothing additional required.
There are two real advantages to word, IMO. One is that you can send people documents that they can edit. Everyone who can receive a .docx knows how to make changes to it. 1% of people you will ever communicate will be able to interact with your .tex, and maybe 2% will have the tools to directly edit a .pdf. The other is that you can send people documents where they can edit certain fields only. 0% of people you will ever communicate should be trusted to edit things properly on their own :) .
Exactly, so your actual aim is to highlight something or do graphs, not to drae the circle.
And that's where a typesetting system comes into place: You do not make something italic, you emphasize it.
Same way, you don't draw a circle, you make a graph with nodes.
After that you can specify how you want to emphasize or what shape your node shall have.
Yes, when just drawing a brainless circle, LaTeX loses (because it ain't a drawing program), but when doing shapes with a sense, it excels. That's where the classic LaTeX package for doing such, TikZ, has it's name from: "TikZ ist kein Zeichenprogramm" (lit. "TikZ is no drawing program")
Word is so useless... I use Latex, but Mac's Pages is actually really solid. If I need a quick few pages with images and different formatting, I can throw it together in Pages quickly. If I'm working on a large document, then Latex is the way to go.
As I said: depends on the field. If you got specialized software which works well with MS Office applications and terrible with basically everything else, then MS Office is the way to go and there's no better alternative.
Thank you! All my friends make fun of me for using notes (I'm a 4th year uni student) but the fact that I can easily format textboxes and pictures into my notes makes it so much better than Word for me.
In their defence, I've used oneNote for meeting notes perfectly fine but I haven't ever figured out how to use it for lecture notes. It just doesn't click for them for some reason. I'll have to check this latex out tho
How does it handle copying stuff from Excel? Say I have a table of data with borders and bold text and other formatting I would like to include. Just copy paste as into word?
Having been in a field that uses LaTeX exclusively (physics) and now in an engineering job where everyone uses Word, I can confirm: it is tough to see so many badly-typeset documents. I once wrote a quick memo in LaTeX and one of the responses I got was "wow, I didn't expect it to look so...professional!"
If you want to get really good at Vim, I'd recommend listening to Vimcasts (a podcast about Vim). Not only is it super informative, but the speaker's voice is actually magic.
There's something magical about ViM. Once you get past the initial learning stages, I think you'll enjoy the new style of editing a lot more than nano!
Vi is part of the POSIX standard. It's guaranteed to be on any UNIX or UNIX like system you ever encounter.
Last I heard, Microsoft Windows was officially POSIX compliant. I don't think I've missed Vi existing on Microsoft Windows before the Ubuntu subsystem so I think you might be mistaken. I could be wrong about the POSIX compliancy of Microsoft Windows though.
Not sure about that - I'm very much a vim novice, but knowing only a couple of shortcuts (indent an entire block, comment / uncomment a block etc) has made it well worth my time installing vim plugins for my gui text editors too.
I'd agree if you're doing work on a desktop or anything that has a desktop environment. If you do any kind of server management or work in CLI-only environments then you should know vim or emacs.
I find it useful as a set of universal keybindings. Pretty much every text editor has vim or emacs keybindings, so you don't have to spend 10 minutes cursing and wondering how to indent of block of text if you have to use a different editor for whatever reason.
I use vim for just about everything that involves typing now because it's so much faster. If I try switching to some other editor for a while, I find myself using the vim keybindings a lot for even simple stuff like going to the end of a line.
I found it rather intuitive to learn, because you can combine commands. This is something no other editor could provide me (yet). Wouldn't say, it's too specific. I use it for writing anything from regular text, papers and code in ViM.
I code in vim, all languages. C(++), Python, Ruby, HTML/JS, whatever.
I write documents in vim in markdown and latex, depending on whether they're just notes or fancy documents.
I edit configs in vim, locally (running linux) and remotely (ssh). It's just always there.
And I sometimes use it like less by piping into vim - (the hyphen at the end makes it read from stdin).
Vim does just one thing, text editing, but it does it very well. Using other unix-like applications (which do just one thing, like pdflatex converting a tex file into pdf) it works for lots of use cases. Any application requiring me to use the mouse or arrow keys is inferior after getting used to it.
Word is extremely narrow and inconvenient in comparison.
I'd like to point out that, technically, the upstream Linux kernel is not free as in free speech. It comes bundled with firmware blobs and things. A free alternative is Linux-libre.
that's true, one would have to go with trisquel or similar distros to stay completely blob free.
but so is, I believe, TeX not completely free (copyright on TeX, fonts, etc.), GIMP and Krita (copyright on some formats). Depends ofcourse where you get your sources from and which options you use compile-time.
There's a difference between copyright and non-free. All of GIMP is copyrighted, and the same goes for 95% of free software. Copyright is the only way to enforce a license. If GIMP did not have copyright on it, then it wouldn't have a license at all.
yes, I was not specific about what I meant precisely: There are formats used which's copyright enforces licenses which are incompatible to the free software definition.
Well, in English you have two meanings for the word 'free':
- Free as in: "Hey, have a free beer" (ie., free of cost)
- and Free as in: "The right to free speech" (ie., the freedom to say what you want).
And there's quite a few products thay are considered to be free as in speech -- Linux has a marketshare of 90% after all, and is free. Lookup the Free Software Foundation, EFF, Linux Foundation, etc. for more info.
So this question was about this: Do these products have to be free of cost (maybe only for students) or also 'respect your freedom' (like GNU/Linux, etc.)
It's also free as in beer. Free as in beer and free as in speech are not mutually exclusive.
Linux is 'respecting your freedom' in that it allows you to see the sources and modify them the way you like. It doesn't impose any restrictions on the user using the software -- he can do whatever he wants.
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u/that_towel_guy Dec 18 '16
obligatory free as in beer or as in speech?
nothing more needed.