You're planning on writing a paper. Neat! You'll need to set up a version controlled repository with git. Here is a set of guidelines to help you do that.
Start by creating a fresh private repository on GitHub and invite your collaborators to join it with write (push) permissions. Next, go to your journal / conference webpage and find their LaTeX style files (typically on an author instructions page). Once you've done that, try to mimic the following folder structure in your repository:
repository_name/
├── main.tex % your main tex file (this imports the sections below)
├── abstract.tex % your abstract
├── introduction.tex % your introduction section
├── background.tex % your background section
├── (other major section tex files) % other sections in your paper
├── sources.bib % the bib file
├── venue_style.sty % the style file for your journal/conference
├── venue_class.cls % the class file for your journal/conference
├── venue_bib_style.bst % the bibliography style file for your journal/conference
├── shortex.sty % shortex style file, from www.github.com/trevorcampbell/shortex
├── figures/ % a folder for your figures
│ ├── your_figure.png
│ ├── your_other_figure.png
└──scripts/ % a folder for simple scripts (no serious code here)
├── some_simple_code.py
└── nothing_too_fancy.py
You should use the main LaTeX file provided by your venue, but try to fill it out
in a manner similar to this one (I used the NeurIPS 2019 style file for this example).
Note how each section is contained in its own .tex file: this prevents a lot of
unnecessary merge conflicts when more than one person is working on the text together.
\documentclass{article}
% import your packages first
\PassOptionsToPackage{numbers, sort&compress}{natbib}
\usepackage[final]{neurips_2019}
\usepackage{shortex}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} % allow utf-8 input
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc} % use 8-bit T1 fonts
\usepackage{hyperref} % hyperlinks
% define any special commands you want just for this paper
\newcommand{\prox}[2]{\ensuremath{\operatorname{prox}_{#1}\left(#2\right)}}
\newdimen{\algindent}
\setlength\algindent{1.5em}
\makeatletter
\newcommand{\LineComment}[2][0]{\Statex \hspace{#1\algindent} \hskip\ALG@thistlm $\triangleright$ #2}
\makeatother
\newcommand{\distUnifSubset}{\distNamed{UnifSubset}}
\title{On Paper Writing}
\author{%
Authorina Authorton\\
Department of Authorship\\
University of Authors\\
Authorbrook, Authorzy\\
\texttt{author@authors.edu} \\
\And
Writer McWriterstein\\
Department of Writing\\
University of Written Things\\
Writerville, Writergaria\\
\texttt{writer@writtenthings.edu}
}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
\input{abstract}
\input{intro}
\input{background}
\input{writing_stuff}
\input{other_stuff}
\input{experiments}
\input{conclusion}
\input{acknowledgements}
\small
\bibliographystyle{unsrt}
\bibliography{sources}
\newpage
\appendix
\input{some_proofs}
\input{more_experiments}
\end{document}
Your section (and appendix section) files should look like the following. Note here that I provide two examples of a paragraph: one which is entered as a single, huge line with no linebreaks; and another with linebreaks to limit the width of the text. Please enter your text with frequent linebreaks; it makes version control work better and displays better in a wide range of editors.
\section{The Section}\label{sec:the_section}
This is a paragraph that is entered as one gigantic line. Depending on which text editor you use (I use vim), one long single line can render poorly. It is also a huge headache for proper version control, since version control does diffs on a per-line basis; if you make an edit to this paragraph, the entire paragraph will appear in the diff making it really hard to see where the changes were made.
In contrast, here is a nicely entered paragraph split over multiple lines.
LaTeX does not care about single newlines and will typeset this
as a paragraph in your PDF. This is much easier to read for a wide range of editors.
It also works well with version control, since git does diffs on a per-line basis,
so only the edited lines get shown.
Please enter your text with nice line breaks and do not write gigantic one-liners.
See my other post on creating a bibliography with BibTeX to see how to fill in the sources.bib file.