How to organize math notes?

Question

I need to organize all of my math notes. I would like to create a sort of library of notes, where a note can link other notes and each note is stored in plain text format (for example, Markdown + Katex/Mathjax) because I want to git track the whole thing.

Whatever the format, there should be an editor available with instant-preview. Also it should be easy to export individual notes or groups of note to publishable formats like PDF and HTML.

All the notes should be quickly searchable by keywords.

I don't need mobile support.

I am open to suggestions. I'm on Linux, but browser-based apps are welcome, as long as they can run offline.

Note: I recently posted Private local wiki for structured math journal?, which was specific to wiki. Here I am looking for alternatives not involving wiki.

Answer 1

Here is a long blog post by a guy who uses SVG Editor Inkscape to quickly draw illustrations for Math lecture notes. It has an "Export to Latex" feature which is hidden inside the "Print as PDF" dialog. He also uses Vim and git I think. Linux only.

See discussion on Hacker News (~100 comments) for more ideas.

Answer 2

The standard option for math notes is, of course, LaTeX and you can use the hyperref package for linking and for example ag for searching. There are many editor that include instant preview, but you can also add that to any editor using latexmk. Though instant preview is something I tend to avoid because it distracts from the structure instead of the formatting.

If you prefer a more markdown-like syntax, tagging with keywords, export to html, pdf, odt,... http://orgmode.org/ by itself convinced many people to learn to use emacs.

Answer 3

You can also use a MarkDown syntax with something like MathJax integrated.

5 years later, we can use Obsidian to organize various kinds of notes (both Scientific and Technology related) as it comes with MathJax already built in. Here is a link to their math part of the documentation.

However, if you do not want to be tied to one specific application, Github has also support for MathJax syntax natively meaning you can omit Obsidian (or switch to your preferred markdown editor) and use a plain GitHub repository.