notecalc3 VS SoulverCore

To the OP, congratulations for stopping procrastination. :-) I like the idea of your project,I'm often in need of a little tool to help quickly calculate some finance related data. In this case, I often launch a LibreOffice sheet but it is rather heavy for what I need. I'll give your tool a try.

If you are looking for having notecalc3 running locally, the github[0] repository has all the installation instructions (not found in the documentation)

[0] https://github.com/bbodi/notecalc3

This looks fantastic. I will definitely give it a spin. I've been tracking what I call "computational scratchpad" apps for a while now but haven't found one that fits my environment/workflow yet. Maybe Heynote will. Here are some others that I've looked at:

* https://soulver.app Granddad of them all, Mac-only, proprietary, expensive

* https://numi.app Mac-only, proprietary, semi-expensive. Has a Github and claims to be MIT-licensed but I don't see how you could build a working application with what's in the repo.

* https://calca.io Windows- and Mac-only, proprietary, not expensive, nice docs.

* https://notepadcalculator.com Web-based, not open source, hosted but uses local storage. You can optionally create an account to sign in and have your notes saved in plaintext on his server.

* https://github.com/bbodi/notecalc3 Web-based, open source, self-hostable. But it seems to save your document in the URL string itself, which means the URL gets updated with almost every keystroke. Worth it for quick calculations and very small notes, I guess.

* https://numpad.io Web-based, hosted, not open source. Also stores entire doc in URL, but doesn't update the URL bar the whole time you're typing.

* https://numbr.dev/ Web-based, hosted. Has a Github but is not open source and the repo does not have all the bits needed to self-host it. Stores entire doc in URL.

* https://github.com/metakirby5/codi.vim Vim/NeoVim plugin that is less like a "smart notepad" and more like Jupyter but with results printed on the right side of the screen instead of in a cell below. Supports lots of programming languages.

I made a list of calculators like this which were shared here on HN over time https://gist.github.com/SMUsamaShah/6546011091d53380354484a3...

From these https://bbodi.github.io/notecalc3/ and https://notepadcalculator.com/ are the most programmer friendly (supporting <<, ^, binary, hex etc)

Another paradigm are Notebooks. Jupyter style are pretty popular these days, something like Wolfram Alpha's step-by-step mode or this project recently noted on HN https://bbodi.github.io/notecalc3/ are all good examples. Plenty of people use spreadsheets to explicitly chain operations.

A specific operation is much less important than the context, dimensional analysis, getting order-of-magnitude or precision correct. Performing operations narrowly is probably operating on the wrong level.

Very cool!

This reminds me of the open source NoteCalc: https://bbodi.github.io/notecalc3/

It was discussed on HN, you might look there for inspiration: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25495393

Since others already mentioned many fantastic alternatives, let me share mine: https://bbodi.github.io/notecalc3/

I answered here: https://github.com/bbodi/notecalc3/issues/6#issuecomment-749...

In a previous versions, only the changed areas were re-rendered, but the code was much more complex and error-prone, and it did not bring any performance improvement, so now I just rerender everything, still excellent performance but much simpler code.

I did similar experiments with GPT4 and Soulver[1], though I "tuned" it by teaching it Soulver interactively before continuing to prompt. It can then be used in the same way. My primary goal was to add basic calculation capabilities to GPT, that are: a) guaranteed to halt (all Soulver sheets are functions) and b) readable by both GPT and the user (a Python program may be too dev-oriented for normal people).

It worked quite well. To well almost: I started a meta-conversation where I asked another GPT4 instance to come up with conversations SoulverGPT could have with a user where the addition of solving is beneficial. This worked, and eventually even found a bug in Soulver - essentially fuzzing the language.

[1] https://github.com/soulverteam/SoulverCore