It only shows my academic background when I say that I use Latex for editing anything. From articles to grocery shopping lists, I like the polished result of a Latex document.

And all this started when, in school,  I started using Latex to do my homework. Sure, it used to take a little longer to have it done. But it sure looked much better than doing it by hand.

I always used vim do thinks like Latex editing, after a short period when I used Emacs + Auctex. Although Auctex is a fantastic system, with lots of nice options for Latex users, the simplicity of vim editing always struck me as the right way to do things.

In the last few days, however, I found an open source project that tries to bring many of the features of Auctex to the vim world. It is called vim-latex. From their web page [1]:

We attempt to provide a comprehensive set of tools to view, edit and compile LaTeX documents without needing to ever quit Vim. Together, they provide tools starting from macros to speed up editing LaTeX documents to compiling tex files to forward searching .dvi documents.

See the features page for a brief tour of the various features in LaTeX-suite. All these features can be tuned extensively using the included texrc file.

vim-latex has extensive support for math symbols, folding, Latex compilation, and entering Latex environments. You can compile the whole document, or just parts of it. It makes it easy to visualize what is going on, or fixing problems as they show up.

Even better, vim-latex works on Windows, so I can work on my Latex documents even when I am not working on a Linux box.

Links:

[1] http://vim-latex.sourceforge.net/

Becoming more productive is a major goal for most information workers. For this purpose, many methods have been proposed by productivity “gurus”. These methods include the well known GTD.

The reason why many of these methods don’t work is that they impose a lot of structure that helps, but that also can make life even more boring.

I think that many of these methods are overkill, so I use a simple technique that I believe is more effective. It is what I call the 5 min technique.

The first step is to classify tasks in order of importance. Your most important projects should come first. However, you shouldn’t spend too much time doing this, as you will see.

The core of the technique is to allot five minutes to work on one of your most important projects, while trying to do the most amount of work during that period.

While some people will think that the intervals of five minutes are insufficient to achieve anything useful, there are several advantages of doing this:

• Anyone can take five minutes of their time to do something. It is the same time it take to get a cup of coffee of use the restroom. However, if you use this time to do something of importance, if will add up.
• It gives you a starting point. If you started with five minutes, you could just as well work for more 10 or 30 minutes. It depends on your current schedule. Even if you can’t continue, you did something of high priority.

Using the 5 min technique is easy, and is addictive. With time, you will be continuously thinking about how to spend your next five minutes, and that is a good frame of mind. And if you don’t have a list of priorities, then you can just start now, by taking five minutes to list your most important projects and tasks.

Recently I decided to import some of my files stored on CVS repositories into Git. The idea is to make the files easier to maintain and update. Also, this way I don’t need to remember different methods to update files. Finally, it is nice to be able to use git tools such as git-gui.

The process is simple. You just need to use the git cvsimport command. This is my command line:

git cvsimport -a -v -d <location of cvsroot> -C newDir <module>

The meaning of this is as follows: the -a parameter is used to import the whole history (if you have a long history, maybe this will be slow). The -v option shows what is going on (verbose). The -d has the same meaning as on the cvs command, i.e., to show the where the root directory is. The -C option determines where the result will be stored. And finally you need to type the name of the module.

I really wanted to import all modules at the same time, but it seems that cvsimport doesn’t know how to do this. I tried to use “.” as a module name. That works with cvs to checkout everything, but cvsimport doesn’t like it. Anyway, I now can import my old files and use only git.