Previewing LaTeX symbols without preview-latex

This blog’s most popular post is the Emacs howto entry, so I thought I’d share one more LaTeX-related tip for all your Emacs needs. Besides the traditional preview-latex way of generating TeX formulas inside Emacs buffer, there’s a faster and neater way to do this using Emacs’ unicode support. My friends Erik Parmann and Pål Drange made a simple package that turns many math symbols and Greek letters commands into corresponding unicode characters. Here’s a sample of how this looks:

If you’re running Emacs 24, you can get the package from MELPA repository. Otherwise you can get it from Erik’s bitbucket, put it somewhere in your load path and load it with (require 'latex-pretty-symbols). There, happy TeXing!

(also, you can make similar tricks with Haskell mode and have all your lambdas displayed properly).