notecalc3 VS libqalculate

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.

1) a scientific calculator with history and variables with a UI similar to https://sourceforge.net/projects/alt1-calculator/ that also can do units like https://qalculate.github.io/ 2) a tiny text chat direct message program that is similarly as easily accessible at Atl1 3) a minimalist dock of as many instances you would like similar to https://punklabs.com/rocketdock, and like where WIN opens the start menu, WIN + # should pop the dock

But unfortunately gravity is the first unit that I find is not supported :(

There's some talk about using g0 here https://github.com/Qalculate/libqalculate/issues/498 but that doesn't work in my version (I'm using an old version, hoping to update my OS this week). You can divide it by earth gravity if you know it by heart, though

    > 100 km/h / 0.956 s / 9.8 m/s^2

I personally use Qalculate (https://qalculate.github.io/), specifically their CLI version for this purpose. I'm not sure how well it compares to GNU Units, but it works well enough for my needs; and it's fairly simple using English-like syntax.

On the terminal, I use `qalc`[1]. It's a nice natural language calculator that does arithmetic, solves quadratic equations/linear systems, does unit conversions and even a bit of calculus. Combine it with a cli graphing tool and you can do pretty cool things.

Anything more complicated I'm probably ok with latency, so I open up wolframalpha and enter it there, again, in natural language.

[1] https://qalculate.github.io/

Btw, download qalculate.github.io and play around with it a bit. I use it for basically all the physics I do. Complete lifesaver.

Personally I use http://qalculate.github.io/ since I end up having to do unit conversions often, it's pretty handy for that

Btw: http://qalculate.github.io/ is nice. I use CLI version to fix my general math incompetence. Even does units nicely, for example, "how long it would take to download 82GB game on 50Mbit connection":

Mate Calculator: Seems a bit basic, when you can do so much more with Qalculate! https://qalculate.github.io/