[HN Gopher] Qalculate - A multi-purpose cross-platform desktop c...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Qalculate - A multi-purpose cross-platform desktop calculator
        
       Author : pantalaimon
       Score  : 180 points
       Date   : 2023-08-07 17:44 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (qalculate.github.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (qalculate.github.io)
        
       | georgeburdell wrote:
       | As an engineer, I usually can just pop my expression into
       | Siri/Spotlight or Cortana with a hotkey and get the result just
       | fine. What kinds of calculations are people needing more for?
        
         | discordance wrote:
         | Can you do dimensional analysis in Siri?
        
           | marcosdumay wrote:
           | Or solve equations?
           | 
           | I imagine Siri has a database of constants, but is it usable?
        
           | georgeburdell wrote:
           | I'm not sure what dimensional analysis means in this context.
           | Is this like "does N-m = kg x m2/s2"?
        
             | dTal wrote:
             | Indeed, alongside all the other numerical calculations and
             | symbolic manipulation...
             | 
             | Example question: what is the diameter of a sphere of
             | tungsten - in inches, say - that weighs the same as a human
             | (say, 150 lbs)?
             | 
             | Looking up the formula for the volume of a sphere gives: v
             | = (4/3) pi (r^3), and googling the density of tungsten
             | gives us 19.3 g/cm3.
             | 
             | Great! Now we already have inches, centimeters, pounds,
             | grams, a fiddly ^3 to trip up our unit conversion from
             | cubic centimeters to cubic inches (or is it vice versa?),
             | some rearranging of an equation to extract the 'r'...
             | 
             | Luckily with qalculate, we can just smoosh it all together
             | without thinking. We can substitute 'd/2' for "r", followed
             | by 'x' for 'd' to tell qalculate that that's the quantity
             | we want to figure out, and put it in inches while we're at
             | it:
             | 
             | v = (4/3) pi ((x/2 inches)^3)
             | 
             | We're not after the volume but rather the mass, which is
             | the volume times the density, and should equal 150lbs:
             | 
             | 150 lb = (19.3 g/cm3) (4/3) pi ((x/2 inches)^3)
             | 
             | Hit enter and:
             | 
             | x [?] 7.434184004
             | 
             | Amazing. A 7.4 inch cannonball of tungsten weighs as much
             | as an adult human. Note that the result is only
             | dimensionless because we balanced the equation - if we'd
             | messed up any part of this formula, we'd have probably got
             | our answer back in some perverse unit instead.
             | 
             | Oh and we didn't actually need to look up the formula for
             | the volume of a sphere:
             | 
             | 150 lb = (19.3 g/cm3) sphere(x/2 inches)
        
               | jandrese wrote:
               | I'm confused why the result is dimensionless when you
               | asked for inches.
        
               | scraptor wrote:
               | Its returning the text that needs to be inserted in place
               | of x to make the equality true. Since the parentheses
               | already contain the inches they are not redundantly
               | attached to the x. If you remove the inches from the
               | query you get the result in mm, you would use 150 lb =
               | (19.3 g/cm3) (4/3) pi ((x/2)^3) -> inches to get the
               | answer in inches.
        
         | themodelplumber wrote:
         | Can it do ans* etc. Is there a history of expressions and
         | results. Is the history on-screen while next expression is
         | typed. Is there a current result indicator, i.e. live update of
         | the expression result as you fiddle with parameters.
         | 
         | Just what's coming to mind for basic daily use here.
        
       | rom1v wrote:
       | There is also the command line version: `qalc`.
       | 
       | I use it since I discovered it.
        
         | Aachen wrote:
         | Same. I was happy with `apt install calc` (I think nowadays
         | called apcalc) for years because it does arbitrary precision
         | and isn't as awkward as a python shell or so, but qalc is
         | clearly a step up with support for units and solving
         | $ calc 2^x=4         x is undefined         $ qalc 2^x=4
         | ((2^x) = 4) = (x = 2)
         | 
         | I used the above for determining after how many years a given
         | inflation rate doubles a price (1.03^x=2)
         | 
         | I think my most recent real-world application for units
         | calculation was about how much energy a device uses in kWh
         | after a year, given that it draws 10W during office hours:
         | $ qalc 10W*(8h/day)*1year to kWh
         | (10 * watt) * ((8 * hour) / day) * (1 * year) = 29.22 kW*h
         | 
         | It even does time calculations: 13:37-08:00 tells you that
         | you've been working for about 5.6 hours.
         | 
         | I don't know why this isn't the universally used command-line
         | calculator. I have it on my phone as well via a Debian
         | subsystem and it's the best
        
           | kbd wrote:
           | > $ qalc 10W _(8h /day)_1year to kWh
           | 
           | Question: why didn't you need quotes around the first
           | expression? Both Zsh and Bash error on that command without
           | quotes. Are you using nushell?
        
             | Aachen wrote:
             | Omitted for simplicity
        
             | poetaster wrote:
             | hmmmm. bash worked for me as was ?
        
         | glibg10b wrote:
         | I use it as my calculator app on my phone
        
       | amelius wrote:
       | If this evolves a little further, you get Jupyter notebooks.
        
         | akho wrote:
         | Doing units in Python is a pain. No easy RPN/stack mode. No
         | flexibility in parsing. Vector, matrix, and date maths require
         | weird syntax. No good concept of infinite number.
         | 
         | Stuff it. I'm just reformulating
         | https://qalculate.github.io/features.html ; you can do that
         | yourself.
        
           | amelius wrote:
           | https://docs.sympy.org/latest/modules/physics/units/index.ht.
           | ..
        
       | bityard wrote:
       | Anyone else just use the Python REPL as their desktop calculator?
        
         | oneshtein wrote:
         | bc -l
        
         | nuxi wrote:
         | For one-off simple calculations I just use awk, with this handy
         | function in my .bashrc:                 function calc() { awk
         | "BEGIN{print $*}"; }              # usage in bash       $ calc
         | 'sqrt(25) + 2**3 - 17.17'       -4.17
        
         | freedomben wrote:
         | Yes! (although ruby (irb) instead of python). It's amazingly
         | useful to be able plug in expressions in a single line of text
         | format. Though for more complex expressions, something like
         | qalculate looks nice to me.
        
         | idanp wrote:
         | yes, with modifications - https://github.com/idanpa/calcpy
        
           | poetaster wrote:
           | Looks really nice! I wanted to ask if 'matplotlib' was
           | strictly needed since it's a big depends?
        
             | idanp wrote:
             | matplotlib is not needed, SymPy fallsback to ascii plotter
             | and this is what I use on phone with termux.
        
       | cyfex wrote:
       | It's a really great calculator for all sorts of stuff.
       | 
       | I use many of the following almost daily:
       | 
       | - currency conversion: `x USD to EUR` or `BTC to USD`
       | 
       | - time calculations: `now - 27 hours`
       | 
       | - unix epoch conversion: `timestamp(now - 3 days)`, also
       | `stamptodate()`
       | 
       | - unit conversion: `34 oC to oF`
       | 
       | and more.
       | 
       | Works really nicely with https://github.com/svenstaro/rofi-calc
        
       | FpUser wrote:
       | Beautiful piece of work. Kudos
        
       | jnsaff2 wrote:
       | I find it quickest to CTRL+SHIFT+K if I'm in the browser or run
       | `iex` or `python3` in terminal to calculate something ad-hoc.
        
       | 6510 wrote:
       | I'm told if you don't use floats the computer will explode and
       | the whole city will burn down. End times, armageddon scenario
       | pretty much.
        
       | netbioserror wrote:
       | If you want a lighter-weight package featuring a plaintext REPL,
       | a large library of functions, function definition, arbitrary
       | precision, and more (minus solver capability), give Speedcrunch a
       | try:
       | 
       | https://heldercorreia.bitbucket.io/speedcrunch/
        
         | badtension wrote:
         | Speedcrunch is great but has (had?) a very annoying bug: was
         | pretty slow after a while. You need to manually clear the
         | history to make it load fast again.
         | 
         | I have it on speed dial (pause / break key to open and close)
         | and use it all the time.
        
         | ziml77 wrote:
         | A note to anyone using a high DPI display: you can build this
         | from source and get a version that scales itself cleanly
         | instead of forcing the OS to make a blurry mess out of it.
        
           | eviks wrote:
           | what changes would you need to make so that the build isn't
           | blurry?
        
         | lholden wrote:
         | I switched from Speedcrunch to Qalculate a while ago. I don't
         | actually remember _exactly_ why I switched at this point. (I
         | think due to a lack of updates). Qalculate very similar in many
         | ways, but I do like the interface on Speedcrunch better (after
         | hiding the keyboard). The new UI for Qalculate has a similar
         | enough feel to Speedcrunch that I 've been happy with it.
        
         | patrec wrote:
         | Qalculate has a plain text repl (qalc), as well. And, as far as
         | I know, all the other things you mention. Speedcrunch might be
         | awesome for all I know (never tried it), but your comment does
         | not really shed any light on why one would pick it over
         | qalculate (what does "lighter-weight" mean? It's not like
         | qalculate takes minutes to start up or is hard to use).
        
           | ciupicri wrote:
           | The plain text qalc doesn't compare with Speedcrunch. How do
           | you copy & paste for example? Speedcrunch also has a shortcut
           | for putting the result into the clipboard.
           | 
           | You can make Speedcrunch look like a good old fashioned bc
           | session, whereas Qalculate puts way too much stuff on the
           | screen. It misses a simple REPL mode.
        
             | tryptophan wrote:
             | I strongly prefer speedcrunch due to it opening much faster
             | and being simpler.
             | 
             | Qalc has poor documentation so I don't find learning its
             | extra features to be worthwhile.
             | 
             | Qalc is also awkward to type.
        
             | Aardwolf wrote:
             | You can copypaste plain text to and from the terminal, what
             | kind of copypaste do you mean?
        
               | ciupicri wrote:
               | The shortcuts aren't the same, especially for copy. For
               | example instead of Control+C (which normally interrupts
               | the program), you have to use Shift+Control+C.
        
         | poetaster wrote:
         | I'll +1 speedcrunch It's also been built for off-broadway
         | mobile OS Sailfish.
        
         | pxc wrote:
         | In college, I started out with SpeedCrunch because it comes
         | with many KDE-based Linux distros as their default calculator.
         | I eventually went on to play with a few alternatives and
         | ultimately settled on Cantor, which is a nice, notebook-style
         | frontend for pretty much every mathematical programming
         | environment you can think of (including Qalculate!). At the
         | time, I really liked using it with Maxima (and sometimes R).
         | 
         | https://cantor.kde.org/
        
         | themodelplumber wrote:
         | Plus you can quickly build websites with speedcrunch IIRC
         | 
         | Edit: https://www.friendlyskies.net/speedcrunch/
         | 
         | Kinda funny but also impressive in its way...
        
       | curiousfab wrote:
       | Fantastic tool. It also has a command line version which has
       | almost completely replaced `bc` for me.
        
         | jstanley wrote:
         | The most annoying part about bc is always having to type
         | "scale=5" before you start otherwise it makes you think all
         | your answers are integer.
        
           | fuzztester wrote:
           | What danadam said.
           | 
           | Also:
           | 
           | https://www.gnu.org/software/bc/manual/html_mono/bc.html#TOC.
           | ..
           | 
           | Environment variables
           | 
           | BC_ENV_ARGS
        
           | danadam wrote:
           | "bc -l" runs it with scale set to 20. Also preloads some math
           | functions.
        
             | mnw21cam wrote:
             | The word "some" is definitely an exaggeration here.
        
               | gavinhoward wrote:
               | Not on my bc. [1]
               | 
               | If it's missing anything you need, let me know.
               | 
               | [1]: https://git.gavinhoward.com/gavin/bc
        
       | poetaster wrote:
       | I wanted to chime in as a calculator dev dude. Qalculate is
       | really nice if you want the kitchen sink, which I do on the
       | desktop. I also, depending on the task use speedcruch which
       | others have mentioned.
       | 
       | Using https://github.com/ArashPartow/exprtk I have one calculator
       | with a repl at 512kb, including a QML wrapper. I have a combined
       | rpn calculator using sympy (based on the work of others) with
       | exprtk as a 'programmer's calculator' on the side
       | (https://github.com/poetaster/fibonacci). And several QML apps
       | for symbolic CAS using sympy.
       | 
       | I have way too many calculators. They are so much fun to build.
       | Now I ask myself, port the Qalculate methods to macros for exprtk
       | or check out using libqalculate? I'm not sure. exprtk is so
       | light? And adding macros discrete.
        
       | qwerty456127 wrote:
       | Lisp is the ultimate desktop calculator. But this one looks nice
       | anyway.
        
       | poetaster wrote:
       | I forgot to mention in my last comment that
       | https://github.com/vetux/qcalculator is also a nice qt based,
       | exprtk using calculator with a python interface and higher
       | floating point precision than plain exprtk.
        
       | blondin wrote:
       | i wonder why calculator apps are so popular
        
         | akho wrote:
         | They compute things on a computer
         | 
         | "Popular" is a bit of a stretch though, I'm not aware of any
         | fanclubs
        
         | grotorea wrote:
         | It's the oldest use-case for non-human computing and one the
         | things computers are best at compared to humans.
        
       | rnallandigal wrote:
       | I have it bound to `$mod+c` and launched as a floating window in
       | i3. It integrates very well into my workflow as I can just
       | quickly launch, perform a one-off calc, and close it whether I'm
       | in a terminal or elsewhere. Since it saves history, I can always
       | relaunch it and continue where I left off as well.
        
         | cyfex wrote:
         | I have `$mod+c` bound to rofi-calc [1] which I find even more
         | convenient.
         | 
         | 1. https://github.com/svenstaro/rofi-calc
        
           | Svenstaro wrote:
           | Glad you like it. :)
        
             | poetaster wrote:
             | Cool. Just having seen this I guess I'd better look at
             | using libqalculate in earnest!
        
         | xchkr1337 wrote:
         | I hve a global shortcut to open a Julia REPL session and I use
         | that to perform any sort of quick calculations instead of a GUI
         | calculator. The best thing about this approach is that I can
         | always create new functions for stuff I use often.
        
           | bobmaxup wrote:
           | I am not sure if it is of interest to you, but from the cli,
           | qalc's REPL is much faster to start when compared to julia
        
           | sundarurfriend wrote:
           | > The best thing about this approach is that I can always
           | create new functions for stuff I use often.
           | 
           | Do you put those in your startup.jl? Do you have a Startup
           | package like some recommend for Julia 1.9+?
        
         | Aardwolf wrote:
         | I tried this in cinnamon. But I use multiple desktops and if
         | qalculate is already on another desktop, the experience is
         | pretty bad since it doesn't move to this one (and I do want its
         | 'allow only single process at once' enabled so settings save
         | properly)
         | 
         | Does there exist a solution for that?
        
         | nh23423fefe wrote:
         | i like the rpn mode
        
           | kqr wrote:
           | Huh, yeah, it _does_ do RPN. This is actually looking like a
           | serious replacement for my current daily driver, Emacs calc.
        
       | despi wrote:
       | Qalculate is great. I also use insect on the terminal for quick
       | calculations or conversions
       | 
       | https://insect.sh/
        
       | drbig wrote:
       | It is a very versatile piece of software indeed. The minimal mode
       | window is a great pop-up calculator that can do a lot, including
       | conversions and working with physical units.
       | 
       | Highly recommend!
        
       | ceving wrote:
       | Have Droid48 on my phone. I am infested and will never use a
       | calculator without a stack.
        
         | stonogo wrote:
         | This program also supports rpn mode with a stack.
        
       | VadimPR wrote:
       | Are there prebuilt binaries available for macOS? I'm running the
       | GTK version on an m1 and it always takes a few seconds to get
       | going.
        
       | integricho wrote:
       | Not to criticise the application, but how realistic is that such
       | an application weighs ~70MB?
        
         | baal80spam wrote:
         | I knew it would be fairly big but 70MB is ridiculous. I weep
         | for today's software.
        
         | pantalaimon wrote:
         | qalculate-gtk is 3.7M on my system with libqalculate.so.22.17.4
         | weighing in at 5.7M
        
         | eviks wrote:
         | oh, it's way more than that, on a Mac via brew it needs 600M QT
         | and 50M gtk+3 and a couple of dozen M for other dependencies
        
           | mappu wrote:
           | I think the real issue here is the brew formula - the Qt
           | runtime should be under 50MB (over if you include the
           | chromium packages). Only the full development toolchain might
           | be close to 600M and that clearly isn't needed here,
        
         | dist-epoch wrote:
         | Imagine if it was implemented in Electron, not in Qt. It would
         | have been 300MB+ then.
        
         | procone wrote:
         | Are you really so strapped for disk space that 70MiB impacts
         | your user experience?
         | 
         | EDIT: The parent comment is disingenuous: the application isn't
         | even 70MB. It's only 70MB if you download the windows edition
         | with vendored libicu (unicode, 31MB) library. It weighs around
         | ~20MB on linux distributions, which is insignificant.
        
           | not_a_shill wrote:
           | Even worse this kind of critique is actively cancerous to new
           | developers if they actually think that people outside of HN
           | care about this.
           | 
           | Development productivity over everything. Features matter not
           | app binary size.
        
             | myankoo wrote:
             | > Features matter not app binary size.
             | 
             | *.exe in Everything = 11 586 objects on this machine.
             | 
             | At 70MB a piece that would come out to ~800GB.
        
               | wander_homer wrote:
               | If you'd be running Qalculate on a Linux desktop system,
               | where all the "heavy" dependencies (ICU, GTK or Qt) are
               | already present and shared between all applications,
               | Qalculate wouldn't require 70MB.
               | 
               | Of course you could also provide a Win32 frontend to
               | bring down the space requirements drastically and make it
               | more Windows "native"; there's a well documented
               | libqalculate for exactly those purposes.
        
             | integricho wrote:
             | I don't agree with this, not by a long shot, this kind of
             | mindset is why we have such a cancerous proliferation of
             | overbloated and slow software today and it's just getting
             | worse and worse every day.
        
               | not_a_shill wrote:
               | So what? The tradeoff is that you make much less money
               | with your mindset in exchange for impressing people on an
               | internet forum.
        
             | Beldin wrote:
             | That mindset is why modern-day ultrabooks give the same
             | practical performance as 15 years ago. All of the hardware
             | advances have been gobbled up in the name of "developer
             | productivity".
             | 
             | Check (eg.) the Elevated 4k Demo winner to glimpse what
             | modern computers are actually capable of in the hands of
             | good developers.
        
               | fluoridation wrote:
               | Eh. Binary size by itself contributes very little to an
               | application's performance.
               | 
               | >Check (eg.) the Elevated 4k Demo winner to glimpse what
               | modern computers are actually capable of in the hands of
               | good developers.
               | 
               | If all software were to be built using the same
               | techniques the demo scene uses, nothing would ever get
               | done, and if by chance a project does get released, no
               | one would be able to maintain it afterwards. Let's not
               | confuse art and engineering just because both use code as
               | the medium.
        
               | [deleted]
        
               | dicytea wrote:
               | An application's performance is orthogonal to its binary
               | size.
        
               | GuB-42 wrote:
               | Not orthogonal, maybe diagonal.
               | 
               | Sizecoding productions are an exception, because they
               | tend to use really slow and memory hungry unpackers (can
               | take up to gigabytes of RAM to do their job, for a 4k
               | intro!), and they tend to lack all optimization
               | techniques that could improve speed in exchange for more
               | code (ex: culling, etc...). And flooding memory with
               | millions of generated objects is no problem for these
               | productions, as long as they are not stored in the
               | executable.
               | 
               | But in general, larger binaries are slower to load,
               | simply because there is more bytes to copy from disk to
               | RAM. And although it is not always the case (ex:
               | sizecoding), it usually means a larger memory footprint,
               | resulting in worse CPU cache efficiency, less memory for
               | other apps and filesystem caches, etc... Also, large
               | binaries tend to be a symptom of inefficient code, with
               | too many abstraction layers, poor optimization, etc...
               | Another very common reasons for bloated executables is
               | that they bundle all their libraries, which means that
               | they don't take advantage of shared libraries, requiring
               | the OS to maintain multiple copies of the same library,
               | possibly including some outdated or poorly optimized
               | versions.
        
         | FreeFull wrote:
         | Looking at qalculate in Arch repos, libqalculate comes in at
         | 14.94 MiB, and qalculate-qt at 3.37MiB, so 18.3 MiB total. If
         | you're looking at the Appimage, the rest of the size would be
         | from the libraries it depends on, like Qt/GTK+
        
           | Aardwolf wrote:
           | libqalculate is the mathematics part and the command line
           | tool, while qt is GUI, so it's surprising the GUI part isn't
           | the larger one of the two
        
             | FreeFull wrote:
             | About 6MB of it is the libqalculate.so.22.19.0 file,
             | 1340KiB is .xml files that define all the
             | units/functions/etc, and another 6MB is the documentation.
        
           | wffurr wrote:
           | So a smallish C++ static binary then.
        
             | Cloudef wrote:
             | You took my words
        
       | LispSporks22 wrote:
       | I use calc mode in Emacs for that kind of thing. Any idea how the
       | two compare?
        
       | 29athrowaway wrote:
       | At this point just use a CAS or a TI calculator emulator.
        
         | zzbn00 wrote:
         | I also tend to just use a CAS, specifically maxima (either
         | commandline, via emacs, via wxMaxima or via notebook, see
         | https://github.com/robert-dodier/maxima-jupyter ). It has the
         | plotting, great units etc, and also incredibly handy to do
         | things like a taylor expansion around a point with no effort.
         | 
         | If not maxima, then the old M-x calc will usually do the job
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | anagri wrote:
       | do you have a Mac installer available?
       | 
       | also you need a designer. the website looks like from the 2000s.
       | 
       | thanks for sharing the app.
        
         | pluijzer wrote:
         | Yes this website needs a huge full screen video of models in
         | business attire making calculations on a white board. When
         | scrolling down I don't wish to find out what it does but would
         | like some quotes from people saying how it changed their lives.
         | Some transitions would be nice, the ones that make my fans
         | spin, it gets cold here in the winter. Without it this website
         | is barely usable.
        
           | fuzztester wrote:
           | Totally.
           | 
           | Along the same lines, I'm nearly Goad Complete (TM) with an
           | amazing SaaS called Append-Slash-Ess as a browser extension.
           | It does what you would expect, at the click of a mouse or
           | touch of a finger, no need of keyboards, which are so last
           | century. We aim to obsolete them so we can rake in, oops,
           | take on our mission of improving the world.
           | 
           | And since our team is made up of (literally) outstanding ex-
           | Ghroaglers, we'll only support the Ghroan browser, of course.
           | And it'll detect and reject others, for the benefit of
           | everyone.
        
         | wffurr wrote:
         | A quick click shows that it's available on home brew and Mac
         | ports.
         | 
         | I like the 2000s website style. It's functional, simple, and
         | loads very fast.
        
           | eviks wrote:
           | what the quick click doesn't show is that brew will require
           | ~700mb of dependencies and still installs as a cli app, not
           | an GUI app bundle
        
         | gapan wrote:
         | Can you please point me to a website from the 2000s that looks
         | like this? A wayback machine link would do. Because I
         | definitely don't remember websites from the 2000s looking like
         | that.
         | 
         | The website's design is fine.
        
         | akho wrote:
         | what kind of satire is this
        
         | doodpants wrote:
         | So, you think the website would be better if it:
         | 
         | - had low contrast text in a thin font
         | 
         | - had pointless animations of content fading in as you scroll
         | down
         | 
         | - had a GDPR cookie consent popup
         | 
         | - popped up an interstitial form asking for your email address
         | so you could receive their newsletter, but only after you've
         | had the site open for 30 seconds and were in the middle of
         | trying to read it
         | 
         | - was completely blank if you disabled JavaScript to try to
         | avoid all of that nonsense
         | 
         | No thank you; the current design is unironically _perfect_
         | IMHO.
        
       | eviks wrote:
       | The "ultimate" calculator wouldn't use the same irrelevant-in-PC
       | physical number buttons paradigm, taking up more than half of
       | useful UI space
        
         | zamadatix wrote:
         | If every PC had a number pad I'd agree but efficiently using
         | the top row number keys for both symbols and numbers is a tall
         | expectation for most users to default to. Doubly so when you
         | factor in holding shift and memorizing the operator locations
         | in that row. A full point and click is a great default IMO,
         | even on PC. I'd also argue in the case of devices with a
         | numberpad you're unlikely to care as much about the wasted UI
         | space anyways.
        
         | icegreentea2 wrote:
         | _shrug_ when I ran it the first time, the default GUI is a menu
         | bar, entry area and history. Like:
         | https://qalculate.github.io/images/qalculate-qt.png
        
           | eviks wrote:
           | and I got the screenshot advertized on the main page
        
         | dTal wrote:
         | Feel free to turn it off. The "ultimate" calculator wouldn't
         | deny the _option_ to have the classic button paradigm...
        
           | eviks wrote:
           | That's not a good excuse - that would be an option, not the
           | main UI, and if it weren't the default, than the dev could've
           | realized that that space could be used in a much better way
        
         | orbital-decay wrote:
         | _> irrelevant-in-PC physical number buttons paradigm, taking up
         | more than half of useful UI space_
         | 
         | Calling it irrelevant is a bit like calling vim irrelevant.
         | Classic calculators don't use REPL, they are designed to
         | minimize the number of keypresses required to input your
         | problem and explore it in the intuitive manner. They use highly
         | efficient modal input languages (kind of like vim). Besides
         | being efficient, these languages tend to have one-off commands
         | you have to remember. Having a cheatsheet on your screen by
         | default is useful for discoverability. In the algebraic
         | calculator paradigm and their typical use cases (napkin math),
         | having a history is not very useful (unlike in RPN where having
         | the stack on the screen is nice).
         | 
         | That said, Qalculate is weird in that it uses a REPL and the
         | input line, which is much slower and clunkier than the
         | algebraic input, but still tries to mimic a classic calculator.
         | It's also slow to start. Not sure what's its use case, as it
         | offers neither speed of a classic calculator nor the feature
         | set of full-fledged math software.
        
           | wander_homer wrote:
           | > It's also slow to start.
           | 
           | It's launching instantly here, with cold caches.
        
           | eviks wrote:
           | This doesn't make any sense, what kind of cheatsheet do you
           | need to discover numbers on your keyboard???
           | 
           | What kind of efficient modal input language is it where you
           | have to move your hands off the keyboard and move your mouse
           | to press a button to insert a number?
        
             | orbital-decay wrote:
             | Commands, not numbers. (what is the equivalent of +/- or
             | 1/x?) Algebraic calculators don't have a lot of useful
             | information to display when used properly, maybe the
             | contents of memory registers but not much else. The screen
             | estate can be used for anything, might as well be a
             | cheatsheet.
             | 
             |  _> where you have to move your hands off the keyboard and
             | move your mouse to press a button_
             | 
             | Command cheatsheet, not number cheatsheet obviously
             | (doubling as input won't hurt). Having numbers on it is
             | excessive, as I already said Qalculate does it the weird
             | way.
        
               | eviks wrote:
               | It sems you're still talking about some idealized vim-
               | calculator instead of this app
               | 
               | > Command cheatsheet, not number cheatsheet
               | 
               | How do sin/cos/tan/e/p/i/ln/kg/mod buttons (that take
               | most of the screen real estate ignoring the numbers) help
               | you "cheat"? Do they help you discover sin/cos? Or is
               | there some shortcut label that helps you remember how to
               | toggle some extra options without using a mouse?
        
       | squarefoot wrote:
       | Obligatory mention for bc, a command line arbitrary precision
       | calculator and language.
       | 
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bc_(programming_language)
        
       | ghkbrew wrote:
       | Thanks, I'll stick with Rstudio.
        
       | fuzztester wrote:
       | RealCalc free version from Quartic on Android is not bad. Not
       | comparing it to Qalculate.
       | 
       | And it has a really cool physical-world electronic calculator
       | look, hence the name.
        
         | freedomben wrote:
         | I use RealCalc on Android as well! Been handy to have for
         | years. I bought the paid version and have been pleased with the
         | purchase.
        
           | michaelcampbell wrote:
           | Definitely a purchase I have never regretted.
        
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