Editing LaTeX documents with lots of equations can be sometimes hard if you want to refer to the equations in the text. You can use, if you have a big monitor, put the compiled file to the right of your editor, but on a notebook this is not a good option. If you use AucTex in Emacs, you can use the preview mode.

Here is the text without preview in Emacs And here it is with preview.

You can set the display options in the Option Group “AucTex” under “Preview Appearance”. One more thing: I always compile to pdf (not dvi). In order to generate the preview, you have to set this option back (C-c C-t C-p).