astGrad VS insect

I mean that article of yours highlights the difficulties one encounters fairly well, I would say. I don't disagree that this is (generally) a tricky problem!

Nim allows you to do a lot, e.g. derivatives of a unitful expression with measurement errors [0]. But other aspects run into the reality of dealing with a static type system. For example in Measuremancer [1], the library handling measurements with uncertainties, each `Measurement` is a single generic `Measurement[T]`. Each measurement stores the derivatives for error propagation. Obviously the derivatives have different units. Now, we could make `Measurement` a two-fold generic, `Measurement[T, U]`, but that just makes things more unwieldy in practice, for not much gain.

Without rewriting a majority of existing code you will always run into trouble where your perfect unit type system will either break or you'll need to work around it anyway (e.g. calling into some C library for part of the code).

[0]: https://github.com/SciNim/astGrad#extra-fun

[1]: https://github.com/SciNim/Measuremancer/

Apparently this replaces https://github.com/sharkdp/insect

You might like https://insect.sh/ ;)

For the record I use insect.

https://github.com/sharkdp/insect seems to be somewhat similar, but it's mostly for physical units. However, it's the only opensource one that is embeddable.

Insect: https://github.com/sharkdp/insect

It is a bit slow but has decent features, including some physical units support.

I set up Tilda (or another Guake equivalent; I tried a bunch of them and can’t remember on which I settled in the end) to run it automatically when a terminal is opened, when pressing Scroll Lock. It’s quite neat: when I need to do a quick calculation, I just hit Scroll Lock, which spawns a drop down terminal with the focus; then type whatever I want to calculate; then control-D to dismiss the drop down terminal and I am back in whatever I was doing without moving either hand off the keyboard.

I do more or less the same thing on my Mac with Alfred.

I'm in the same boat and will pay for Kagi, though I have a different interaction with a search engine and thought you might like the counterpoint. Notably, I don't use Google for most of what you described:

Translation: I use DeepL instead (google is doing poorly on Asian languages)

Conversion: not having much need for imperial but I use this for all unit conversion (though usually directly in my terminal): https://insect.sh/

Wikipedia: if I type Wikipedia+something my browser automatically use the wiki engine (chrome can do that too)

Word definition: on OSX I long press on the trackpad and the definition pops up (across languages, translation too for single words)

Lyrics: Spotify show them now! (admittedly that's a recent feature)

insect.sh goes up to about 109 × 1015.