I’m an engineering student, and I use Obsidian for my note-taking and writing. As a consequence, I tend to write lots of equations (both in-line and block). I find that it hinders my momentum every time I try to remember what shortcut exists for this purpose, then shortly remembering after that there’s no such thing.
Proposed solution
I migrated my stuff from Notion here, so a shortcut like Ctrl + Shift + E would be useful for at least the inline equations. If that is not possible, then filling in the other $ or $$ when typing for in-line and block equations would be a good feature to implement as well.
If you select text, and type $ it will surround your selection appropriately. I’m not sure I see the advantage to adding a hotkey for this, wouldn’t it be the same (at least in terms of key presses) as typing $ directly?
I second the request of Godwin and agree with him on the fact that starting to write and equation could be made simpler. @argentum: selecting text and pressing $ is nice but still not very convenient (you have to take the mouse, select, press $). Several improvement could make equation inserting more fluid
typing $ automatically add a second $ to set the equation environment upfront. It would work exactly as “" automatically typing a second "”. This would be the simplest way
making a hotkey (in my LaTeX editor I use Cmd+Shift+M) that type both “$” and put the caret in between
Is it possible to add these features to the app ? Or maybe there is already this solution with a plugin ?
The first option was already added a while back, but had to be removed since most users don’t really use $ for latex equations. I have nothing against the 2nd option, but personally I still don’t see a lot of benefits from using a hotkey ctrl + shift + M (3 key presses) instead of typing $ (2 key presses) twice.
I have written a plugin for speeding up latex math typing in obsidian. It includes the function mentioned above, where typing one $ symbol will automatically be add another $ symbol and put the cursor in between them. The function can be toggled in the plugin setting where needed.
there are quite a few other handy functions such as autoFraction, where you can type 1/2 followed by a space key and it will be replaced with \frac{1}{2}, very much like how it works in word equation~
The plugin can be found in community plugin list with the name “quick latex for obsidian”