[HN Gopher] Show HN: NoteCalc
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Show HN: NoteCalc
Author : bbodi
Score : 174 points
Date : 2020-12-21 14:50 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| sanity31415 wrote:
| Very nice, reminds me of "literate programming":
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming
|
| In a similar vein - a few years ago I built an open source REPL
| calculator called LastCalc (http://lastcalc.org/), which supports
| some advanced ideas from functional programming including pattern
| matching.
| jarym wrote:
| This is soooo nice. I wish there was a +10 option on HN - it'd be
| the first time I'd use it!
| mattweinberg wrote:
| This looks great! The README says:
|
| > Honestly, it just tries to be a free Soulver alternative in
| your browser.
|
| For people on macOS, Soulver is excellent and worth checking out:
| https://soulver.app . I almost always have a Soulver window open
| on my screen.
| 32bitkid wrote:
| Just wanted to also drop a recommendation for soulver, but I
| have been split between it and Calca (http://calca.io/) which I
| think is _also_ worth checking out, if you like this kind of
| hybrid notes/calculator like interface.
|
| The ultimate interface _for me_ would be somewhere in between
| Calca (which I think has superior support for
| functions/graphing/logical calculations) and Soulver (which I
| think has better usability/readability) and a graph-based note-
| taking system like Obsidian/Zettlr. I'm sure somebody will say
| "there is a Vim plugin that'll do that" but... yea.
| frereubu wrote:
| Calca does look like a really nice mix of note-taking and
| calculations. The screenshots made me realise I was missing
| variables in Soulver... until I looked at the Soulver docs
| and realised that it _does_ have variables, I just hadn 't
| thought to look. Thanks for the prompt!
| tesseract wrote:
| Love Soulver and Calca looks great too, thanks for pointing
| that out! Personally I would love a tool like one of those
| but with built in unit handling/dimensional analysis
| capabilities equal or better to the Google search bar...
| chrisofspades wrote:
| This is pretty cool. Reminds me of https://instacalc.com/
| waynesonfire wrote:
| wow, love it.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Link to the public instance:
| https://bbodi.github.io/notecalc3/notecalc
|
| It took me a couple clicks to find, a link in the readme would be
| useful.
|
| It's an awesome tool, I think I will use this a lot. It cover 95%
| of my WolframAlpha use, with an interface that's both more
| responsive and let's me keep track of context and streams of
| thought.
| dvtrn wrote:
| _a link in the readme would be useful._
|
| It's there, already. The direct link in the OP are to the
| release notes
|
| https://github.com/bbodi/notecalc3/blob/develop/README.md
| chaoxu wrote:
| This is pretty good soulver replacement.
|
| I found all these similar tools has the problem that there is
| _exactly one expression per line_.
|
| Is there any exploration of this feature: have the computed
| number shown next to the expression.
|
| I had this problem while using soulver, too. I had a lot of
| artificial line breaks. For calculations it is pretty good, but
| it is pretty horrible when I present it to someone else.
| skulk wrote:
| Something like this exists for emacs as well:
| https://github.com/sulami/literate-calc-mode.el
| chedine wrote:
| This is great. I have always wanted to build this for myself ever
| since i read Bret Victor. Good work
| FpUser wrote:
| Very nice app, I really liked it
| xixixao wrote:
| You should link the website instead:
|
| https://bbodi.github.io/notecalc3/
|
| Awesome work!
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| That's really nice!
|
| Looks like a labor of love.
|
| Thanks for sharing it!
| himujjal wrote:
| Great work.
|
| Is there a Terminal UI for this? Many users love to have simple
| programs in the Terminal itself.
| bbodi wrote:
| Hi, Not yet, it is on my list, but unfortunately with a low
| priority.
|
| But fortunately, the whole architecture was designed with the
| terminal in mind: - 99% of the functionalty is implemented as a
| lib, and just a tiny part is responsible for input and
| rendering, so it is very easy to write new frontend for it. -
| both the rendering and the input uses characters as a basic for
| coordinates, so it is easy to translate the render commands
| generated by the lib to the terminal.
| leejoramo wrote:
| A version to use within VSCode would be very useful too.
| SamBam wrote:
| I was just thinking, turning this into a VSCode plugin would
| be awesome. Would save me from opening up the browser console
| every time I wanted to do some simple math.
| monkeydust wrote:
| Very nice. I end up using google search more frequently for
| simple calcs and have been wanting something to take that to
| another level but not as far as a full blown Juypter notebook.
|
| This could fit that sweetspot for me and others I imagine.
| w0m wrote:
| I usually use Alfred's build in Calc for simple stuff; and
| ipython when i want _more_ (or reproducibility to play with
| numbers better)
| krick wrote:
| Nice. What I really want, though is a CLI calculator (something
| like bc or ipython) that would be clever enough to handle stuff
| like 1000!/999! (increase the number of digits if python will be
| able to do that: I hope you get the idea). I cannot treat
| seriously a calculator in 2020 that actually tries to evaluate
| expressions numerically, while representing numbers as floats or
| int32.
|
| Multiplying matrices and stuff is nice, but I don't think I
| really ever needed that. But simple combinatorics and other
| calculations that involve large numbers and lots of simple
| operations (like powers), but are perfectly calculatable without
| losing precision on a piece of paper -- plenty of times. It's
| annoying that I can calculate on a piece of paper something my
| calculator cannot.
|
| Other than that, maybe some operations over physical units/unit
| conversion and some embedded city/timezone DB, and I don't think
| I can ask more of a calculator.
| bbodi wrote:
| Originally NoteCalc used a library for handling arbitrarily
| large numbers. Unfortunately, some operations were so slow that
| as a quick fix, I replaced the library with a lighter one
| without dynamic allocations (which is 96 bit integer with
| 28scale).
|
| This serves well the primary goal of NoteCalc so I did not
| spend more time on it yet, but I am on the same page as you,
| and if NoteCalc will be feature-complete, I will give an other
| shot to arbitrarily large calculations/precision.
| muizelaar wrote:
| Have you tried isympy? It handles your factorial expression
| easily.
| minxomat wrote:
| Alternative for linux (especially great on eOS): NaSC
| (https://parnold-x.github.io/nasc/)
| [deleted]
| Epskampie wrote:
| Some feedback: it fills my browser history with a lot of entries.
| bbodi wrote:
| Thanks, you are right, I did not notice but yes it could be
| annoying.
|
| The reason is that the content of the note is stored in the URL
| so it is easy to share it by sending the url to friends. So the
| URL changes basically on every modification.
|
| I add it to the fixlist.
| wccrawford wrote:
| If you aren't interested in the history, perhaps you should
| be replacing the state instead of adding to it? Without
| looking at the code, it seems like an easy fix.
| bbodi wrote:
| Yes this will be, thanks :)
| triangleman wrote:
| Wow, so this is rust compiled to JS? Or I guess WASM which is a
| subset of JS? Is this the future of the web?
|
| Also I noticed the base64/deflate URL fragment storing the entire
| text content, a la flems.io ... nice!
| simlevesque wrote:
| Yeah it's Rust to WASM with JS for the startup.
| smusamashah wrote:
| This is amazing. Doesn't feel like a web based tool at all. Can
| even do bitwise operations that's just great. Can there be a
| programmer mode where I can use & and | instead of AND and OR?
| Not a deal breaker though. It's going to help a lot in day to day
| bitwise stuff
| bbodi wrote:
| yeah why not :) I added it to my todo.
| gregoriol wrote:
| On macOS, there is the excellent Numi app
|
| Sadly I haven't found any equivalent for iOS (iPhone and iPad):
| it would definitely get my money!
| filleokus wrote:
| Numi would be my favourite of all these kind of calculators on
| macOS, if it wasn't for the lack of unit calculations[0], e.g
| density = 2 kg / 3 l, mass = 10 dm^3 * density
|
| [0]: Not sure of the actual term in English
| asimpletune wrote:
| I think the term in English is dimensional analysis
| adrianmsmith wrote:
| For those using note-taking apps, I've found that OneNote has a
| similar very useful feature. If you type 1+2= into a note and
| then press the space bar, it'll insert the answer. It can
| understand thousand separators and large expressions with
| brackets etc.
| BOOSTERHIDROGEN wrote:
| is there a docker image ?
| niklearnstodev wrote:
| Exciting to see an open source Rust WASM project as reference for
| us folks who are interested in playing around with it. Thanks for
| the cool work!
| djbeadle wrote:
| This is very cool! The project description says that it is
| inspired by Soulver [1].
|
| A similar (but different) application for iOS is Tydlig [2] which
| can also generate some simple x-y plots.
|
| [1] https://soulver.app
|
| [2] http://tydligapp.com/
| gen_greyface wrote:
| This really looks great.. props to you.
|
| just a nitpick.. changing the theme resizes the panels
| automatically to adjust to the first panel's width
| SamBam wrote:
| Very cool, though I find there's a lack of discoverability as to
| what I can do with it, and no help is provided if there's an
| error. pi() => 3.14... sin(3.14 rad) =>
| 0.00.. sin(pi() rad) => err
|
| No idea why there's that error.
| bbodi wrote:
| Thanks for noticing it!
|
| Unfortunately it seems units cannot be applied to function
| results. It must be fixed, I noted down, thanks!
| bitexploder wrote:
| This is really cool. I am always in Org mode which lets you do
| "literate" programming as well. I think NoteCalc is a little more
| streamlined, but I am very used to throwing a little Python or
| elisp into my notes when I need to do math. Great to see more
| options on this front. Org-babel is a nice package, though it
| does have some limitations.
| b3n wrote:
| Any reason you don't use calc-mode to insert mathematical
| results into your Org buffer? Calc-mode is extremely powerful.
| lxe wrote:
| Wow I didn't even notice this wasn't HTML until I tried pasting
| stuff...
| bbodi wrote:
| I take it as a huge compliment :)
|
| Pasting should work with simple texts, what was the issue?
| Don't hesitate to open an Issue in GitHub if something does not
| work. https://github.com/bbodi/notecalc3/issues
| enos_feedler wrote:
| I wish this was built into the iOS notes app. So many notes are
| just number calculations like this.
| gorkish wrote:
| Love this, but the lack of interpretation of prefixed currency
| symbols is absolutely maddening! That it simply ignores the
| number and operand with no indication that these elements are
| ignored could easily lead to problems. I don't think I could in
| good conscience trust myself or those I might consider to be the
| target audience of this app to notice parsing errors in every
| case. Consider:
|
| "$400 / 20" => 20 (ERROR)
|
| "$400 / 25" => 25 (ERROR)
|
| "400$ / 20" => 20 $ (OK)
|
| "400$ / 25" => 16 $ (OK)
| vageli wrote:
| Your comment made me realize that most unit notation I'm
| familiar with has the unit as a suffix, with currency being the
| only standout that comes to mind.
| [deleted]
| gorkish wrote:
| Binary, ocatal and hexidecimal literals often are indicated
| with prefixes: 0b, 0 and 0x respectively. There are probably
| other esoteric cases that I can't think of off the top of my
| head. "Qty" is often prefixed, for instance. It's a
| complicated problem for a natural language calculator, to be
| sure. Here are a couple examples of ways to represent four
| thousand Canadian dollars that you might encounter and have
| no trouble interpreting as a human. This could be a good
| target for an ML tokenizer...
|
| -$4000CAD
|
| CA$-4,000.00
|
| 4.000,00CAD$
| roywiggins wrote:
| It depends on the currency / country, too. Lots of countries
| put the currency afterwards, even "C/" comes after. $ and PS
| come before, but EUR ends up moving depending on the
| language.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_and_the_euro#Written_.
| ..
| jannes wrote:
| It would also be nice to support other currency symbols. In
| Europe there are EUR and PS, for example.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_currencies_in_Europe
| bbodi wrote:
| In your case syntax highlighting helps. Everything which is not
| part of a calculation is rendered as a simple text (greyish):
| [image](https://trello-
| attachments.s3.amazonaws.com/558a94779b3b3c5d...)
|
| But yes I admit it takes some time to get used to the colors
| and their meanings.
|
| Currencies and exchange between them are on my feature list
| btw.
| gorkish wrote:
| Awesome; this is great to hear.
|
| An idea you might consider is to display some kind of warning
| symbol or message if the input contains digits or operands
| which are not interpreted as part of the calculation that
| produces the output. This would have made the semantic
| meaning of the syntax highlighting immediately more evident.
| codeful wrote:
| notepad + calculator is a really great combination. i'm using
| this time to time:
|
| http://notepadcalculator.com/
| nsajko wrote:
| I'm not quite sure what's the purpose of either NoteCalc or
| Soulver, but I am currently getting acquainted with TeX - and
| from that perspective NoteCalc seems comically under-powered
| compared to what's achievable through plugging into the
| Lua(Meta)TeX engine with Lua, or with the Lua C API.
|
| I'm not criticizing NoteCalc, rather I think somebody should
| create a lightweight note taking tool like that, I don't think it
| would be very difficult by leveraging the already existing
| TeX/ConTeXt/LMTX/LuaMetaTeX machinery, and it would blow the
| Soulver-like stuff out of the water. The main design problem
| could be deciding exactly where between ConTeXt and Soulver
| should the new tool/language lie power-wise, i.e., how much
| should it expose.
|
| I'm not proposing using TeX directly, rather I'm proposing basing
| a new, simpler language on the Lua(Meta)TeX TeX engine, and
| probably also on ConTeXt/LMTX.
| bbodi wrote:
| One of my primary design goal was something like that: "My
| mother should be able to use this tool to calculate/plan her
| vacation expenses". (My mother is older and not a tech guru you
| can guess :)) So the primary focus are on simple calculations
| with meaningful context and immediate feedback. Nothing fancy.
|
| Though, beside that, I think it provides some nice features.
| E.g. the matrix creation/editing functionality was born because
| I could not find a simple tool to double check my rendering
| calculations with.
| nsajko wrote:
| Yeah, I guess NoteCalc will be useful to many people, it's
| just that I'm noticing the sad lack of utilization of LuaTex
| (probably because people don't know it exists and exposes the
| power of TeX through Lua).
|
| The targets of NoteCalc vs. the tool I'm proposing would be
| somewhat different, too, because LuaTex outputs primarily to
| PDF, and I don't know if it can produce HTML.
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