When writing a new document, I begin from one of these templates. I have found these fundamental to my workflow.
Your preferences may vary.
Use latexmk. It's
powerful. My day-to-day use is: 1. write text in Vim; 2. run latexmk -C
and latexmk -pdf main in the terminal; 3. ??? profit.
In terms of packages:
- I use MacTeX.
- I use additional LaTeX packages listed here.
- I use mtpro2 as a default font. It is proprietary and requires manual installation.
I use the listings package for code snippets, with custom syntax
highlighting.