Show HN: NoteCalc

This looks great! The README says:<p>&gt; Honestly, it just tries to be a free Soulver alternative in your browser.<p>For people on macOS, Soulver is excellent and worth checking out: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;soulver.app" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;soulver.app</a> . I almost always have a Soulver window open on my screen.

Link to the public instance: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bbodi.github.io&#x2F;notecalc3&#x2F;notecalc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bbodi.github.io&#x2F;notecalc3&#x2F;notecalc</a><p>It took me a couple clicks to find, a link in the readme would be useful.<p>It&#x27;s an awesome tool, I think I will use this a lot. It cover 95% of my WolframAlpha use, with an interface that&#x27;s both more responsive and let&#x27;s me keep track of context and streams of thought.

For those using note-taking apps, I&#x27;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&#x27;ll insert the answer. It can understand thousand separators and large expressions with brackets etc.

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?<p>Also I noticed the base64&#x2F;deflate URL fragment storing the entire text content, à la flems.io ... nice!

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!&#x2F;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.<p>Multiplying matrices and stuff is nice, but I don&#x27;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&#x27;s annoying that I can calculate on a piece of paper something my calculator cannot.<p>Other than that, maybe some operations over physical units&#x2F;unit conversion and some embedded city&#x2F;timezone DB, and I don&#x27;t think I can ask more of a calculator.

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&#x27;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:<p>&quot;$400 &#x2F; 20&quot; =&gt; 20 (ERROR)<p>&quot;$400 &#x2F; 25&quot; =&gt; 25 (ERROR)<p>&quot;400$ &#x2F; 20&quot; =&gt; 20 $ (OK)<p>&quot;400$ &#x2F; 25&quot; =&gt; 16 $ (OK)

You should link the website instead:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bbodi.github.io&#x2F;notecalc3&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bbodi.github.io&#x2F;notecalc3&#x2F;</a><p>Awesome work!

This is very cool! The project description says that it is inspired by Soulver [1].<p>A similar (but different) application for iOS is Tydlig [2] which can also generate some simple x-y plots.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;soulver.app" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;soulver.app</a><p>[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tydligapp.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tydligapp.com&#x2F;</a>

Something like this exists for emacs as well: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;sulami&#x2F;literate-calc-mode.el" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;sulami&#x2F;literate-calc-mode.el</a>

Great work.<p>Is there a Terminal UI for this? Many users love to have simple programs in the Terminal itself.

On macOS, there is the excellent Numi app<p>Sadly I haven&#x27;t found any equivalent for iOS (iPhone and iPad): it would definitely get my money!

Some feedback: it fills my browser history with a lot of entries.

This is amazing. Doesn&#x27;t feel like a web based tool at all. Can even do bitwise operations that&#x27;s just great. Can there be a programmer mode where I can use &amp; and | instead of AND and OR? Not a deal breaker though. It&#x27;s going to help a lot in day to day bitwise stuff

It sounded great, so I opened a demo page to try it out. Copied the contents of my personal savings note, and wanted to paste it into the NoteCalc to see what magic it would do. Pressed Cmd+V but it didn&#x27;t paste. It just typed v intstead.

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.<p>This could fit that sweetspot for me and others I imagine.

Very nice, reminds me of &quot;literate programming&quot;: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Literate_programming" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Literate_programming</a><p>In a similar vein - a few years ago I built an open source REPL calculator called LastCalc (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lastcalc.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lastcalc.org&#x2F;</a>), which supports some advanced ideas from functional programming including pattern matching.

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!

This is pretty cool. Reminds me of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;instacalc.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;instacalc.com&#x2F;</a>

This is pretty good soulver replacement.<p>I found all these similar tools has the problem that there is <i>exactly one expression per line</i>.<p>Is there any exploration of this feature: have the computed number shown next to the expression.<p>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.

This is really cool. I am always in Org mode which lets you do &quot;literate&quot; 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.

Other similar tools<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mathnotepad.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mathnotepad.com&#x2F;</a> can do graphs and bitwise operations as well<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dedo.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dedo.io&#x2F;</a><p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;notepadcalculator.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;notepadcalculator.com&#x2F;</a>

Very cool, though I find there&#x27;s a lack of discoverability as to what I can do with it, and no help is provided if there&#x27;s an error.<p><pre><code> pi() =&gt; 3.14... sin(3.14 rad) =&gt; 0.00.. sin(pi() rad) =&gt; err </code></pre> No idea why there&#x27;s that error.

I&#x27;m not quite sure what&#x27;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&#x27;s achievable through plugging into the Lua(Meta)TeX engine with Lua, or with the Lua C API.<p>I&#x27;m not criticizing NoteCalc, rather I think somebody should create a lightweight note taking tool like that, I don&#x27;t think it would be very difficult by leveraging the already existing TeX&#x2F;ConTeXt&#x2F;LMTX&#x2F;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&#x2F;language lie power-wise, i.e., how much should it expose.<p>I&#x27;m not proposing using TeX directly, rather I&#x27;m proposing basing a new, simpler language on the Lua(Meta)TeX TeX engine, and probably also on ConTeXt&#x2F;LMTX.

Very nice app, I really liked it

This looks amazing. Can the author explain the implementation choices?<p>* Why WASM?<p>* Why Canvas?<p>From what I could see, it seems to repaint the whole canvas every frame, so I&#x27;m guessing this uses a custom implementation of immediate mode GUI.

Alternative for linux (especially great on eOS): NaSC (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;parnold-x.github.io&#x2F;nasc&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;parnold-x.github.io&#x2F;nasc&#x2F;</a>)

This really looks great.. props to you.<p>just a nitpick.. changing the theme resizes the panels automatically to adjust to the first panel&#x27;s width

That&#x27;s really nice!<p>Looks like a labor of love.<p>Thanks for sharing it!

This is soooo nice. I wish there was a +10 option on HN - it&#x27;d be the first time I&#x27;d use it!

This is great. I have always wanted to build this for myself ever since i read Bret Victor. Good work

I wish this was built into the iOS notes app. So many notes are just number calculations like this.

Wow I didn&#x27;t even notice this wasn&#x27;t HTML until I tried pasting stuff...

notepad + calculator is a really great combination. i&#x27;m using this time to time:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;notepadcalculator.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;notepadcalculator.com&#x2F;</a>

is there a docker image ?

wow, love it.