Defining an abbreviation for `align`

Question

To save myself some keystrokes, I tried to define an abbreviation for \begin{align} and \end{align}

\documentclass[reqno, 11pt]{article}

\usepackage{amsmath, amsfonts, mathtools, amsthm}
\usepackage{fullpage}

\newcommand{\ba}{\begin{align*}}
\newcommand{\ea}{\end{align*}}

\title{Article Template}
\author{You}

\begin{document}
\maketitle

\section*{3}
\ba
e=mc^2
\ea
\end{document}

For some reason, the abbreviation for \begin{align} seems to work, but the abbreviation for \end{align} does not. I thought perhaps that \ea was already in use, but tweaking the name didn't change anything. Any ideas?

You should definitely do that using your editor instead of TeX. TeX code is a markup and ba, ea don't carry any structural information. Many editors have a snippet or expansion function, so you can write ba<hotkey> to expand to \begin{align}. — Marco, Sep 26 '13 at 11:40
@Marco Thanks for the input. I use writelatex.com, which isn't a very sophisticated editor, so that might not be an option. — Eric Auld, Sep 26 '13 at 11:41
This is a documented feature of ams alignments, they need to grab the entire body of the environment as a macro so that it can be set twice (for measuring) so the code needs to find \end{align} to know when to stop the argument. It is possible (but discouraged) to work around that: see the amsmath documentation. — David Carlisle, Sep 26 '13 at 11:44
@DavidCarlisle OK, I guess I'll just have to make the extra keystrokes. :) — Eric Auld, Sep 26 '13 at 11:55
there's a good answer to this question at some \newcommand instructions not working — barbara beeton, Sep 26 '13 at 15:10
See also Defining a shorthand for amsmath's align environment (as commands), for example. Lots of possible 'main questions', just a question of which to pick for a dupe, I'm afraid. — Joseph Wright, Sep 26 '13 at 15:13
@JosephWright Thanks Joseph and Barbara; there are some great suggestions at those links! — Eric Auld, Sep 26 '13 at 15:58

Defining an abbreviation for `align`

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