why

Bad handwriting, easy referencing and searching, organization, portability. This method of using snippets - pre determined shortcuts to typeset saves time and achieves near-instant notetaking in class.

how

inspiration and tutorial i followed
great resource
The 2 above gives great tutorials on how to setup the snippets on mac and linux. In addition, to save time, I directly copied snippets from the dotfiles of elijan mastnak. To get familiar with the shortcuts, I made a lookup table of all the snippets, and I familiarized myself within a week.