Notepad Calculator | Hacker News Reader

Notepad Calculator

notepadcalculator.com

298 pointsarchagon71 comments

I'm the creator of this site. It's a very nice surprise to see it appear here!

I created it a few years ago and recently added the ability to create multiple notes and to sync your notes to the server.

Interested to hear your feedback, please keep it coming!

EDIT:

Just adding that there are two secret features that you can enable via the browser's JavaScript console:

1. Change locale to change the number format used in the answer column:

  localStorage['locale'] = 'en-US'

2. Dark mode:

  localStorage['darkMode'] = 'true'

After running either of the above commands, refresh the tab for the change to take effect.

Its actually brilliant, literally brilliant.

It's a great idea. I think it's one part of a great tool that would give excel a real run for its money. If you can create, populate and reference tables, I think you'd have a real winner.

Hey, is there a reason that I can't use currency units? when I try to use the dollar sign ($) or usd-suffix the calculation fails.

It's because it's not supported out of the box by the mathjs library I'm using: https://mathjs.org/

I agree that this would be nice.

Calculations fail if your browser locale uses number formats incompatible with en-US.

E.g. the "How many weekdays in a month?" (near the top of the page) calculation remains blank for me.

Changing the input from "*5" to "4.333333 * 5" makes it work -- the outcome of the previous step is "4,333333" (comma, not dot), breaking the next step...

ans * 5 also works.

Thanks for reporting this, I'll work on it.

In the meantime, there's a workaround you can use to change the locale by entering the following in the JavaScript console:

  localStorage['locale'] = 'en-US'

The pokemon bd/sp games suffer from a similar issue.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fB2C8q42X64

This should now work regardless of your locale. Please let me know if you notice any more bugs!

I've always found these apps interesting, I feel like if Microsoft added one of these to their office suite, it would replace a lot of use cases that people otherwise abuse spreadsheets for.

I'd love to find a self-hosted version of one of these but at the same time wonder if I'd just end up reaching for a jupyter notebook instead.

Integration with OneNote would be a killer feature. I do a lot of price comparisons and abuse spreadsheets all the time. I have to convert many unit types to ensure apples to apples comparisons which are difficult to keep in your head. So I end up with mangled spreadsheets with tons of text and numbers. Obviously, not the intended use case for spreadsheets.

I’ve used Soulver on the mac to replace a spreadsheet for personal finances and it is amazing. Does a lot of what this does but with better natural language integration and a whole ton of useful functions like compound interest/loan calculations, stock prices, currency conversion, hex math, etc

Love Soulver. It's such a well-made app. My problem is that I use it so infrequently that I often forget I have it.

Microsoft is so close -- after all the office suite already has a built in macro language. I tolerated that language because it was part of my "thinking" app -- Excel -- for so many years. As a non-expert in programming languages, I couldn't fault it in any way, except for being proprietary.

Today, I've gotten to the point where I can barely use any document editing app that doesn't let me insert a code cell, which means for all intents and purposes, Jupyter. Every other authoring tool requires me to copy and paste -- from Jupyter.

Calca is what I use for this, and I think it has a Windows version. Excellent app, though in maintenance mode as far as I can tell.

Soulver's more versatile and dynamic but also only for iOS/Mac, methinks

> I'd love to find a self-hosted version of one of these

Emacs org mode has entered the chat …

In all seriousness, and depending on your use case, tables and executable code blocks come in handy a lot.

Reminds me of Soulver[0], one of my favorite macOS apps.

[0] https://soulver.app/

Soulver's WolframAlpha support is great, too. No need to switch to a browser to bring in some real world data.

How do you do this?

Settings > Calculator > Wolfram|Alpha. You provide a Wolfram ID from WolframAlpha and then "= ?" in a sheet will query WolframAlpha for the previous variable.

https://twitter.com/soulver/status/1592207142047698945

That was the inspiration for this site a few years back. I wasn't a Mac user at the time so couldn't even try Soulver myself but thought it was a cool idea.

There are a bunch of these shared here over time.

https://bbodi.github.io/notecalc3/notecalc

https://dedo.io/

https://numbr.dev/

https://github.com/iaredreich/calcutext

https://calcutext.com/

https://calca.io/

For another one, I use Numi for macos often. It's native, clean looking, can handle units, and maintains it's buffer between launches.

I love it as a virtual back of an envelope to noodle math on.

https://numi.app/

Andrea Juhász

I have a non-exhaustive comparison table of different alternatives here:

https://github.com/xixixao/recomputer#same-use-case

Suggestion: parse any number like 12:03 as 12 minutes and 3 seconds (and 04:12:03 with hours) and represent it as seconds. It makes working with durations a lot easier. This is just an additional parsing rule (could also use 12m3 or 4h12m3) like 1e3 for 1*10^3 but is typically not implemented.

I'm reading 12m3 as "twelve cubic meters"

I do something equivalent (with far more features) in-Emacs buffers with calc functions on a region, perhaps inside an org-mode note.

I do cite that NOT as a critic for the author NOR as advertisement for Emacs but to state a thing: FULLY INTEGRATED ENVIRONMENTS are the way to go. It's absurd that with an OS/set of apps who can do something you can't do something out-of-context. I'm actually write and email? Why I can't solve some math inside of the mail body?

The sole answer I found is commercial software: keeping things separated means having products on sale. Keep anything integrated means far less.

Speaking of literate-calc mode is AMAZING for these sorts of things. It lets you use emacs-calc in a notebook, so you get units, unit conversions, solving. It's great for quick calculations and units make sure you know immediately if you need to divide or multiply.

I use it all the time to make benchmarks for how long something will take, the memory, etc

(Just add this for unit conversions

``` (after! calc (defalias 'calcFunc-uconv 'math-convert-units)) ``` )

Love all of these, here's another one from earlier this year: https://numpad.io/

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32493946

I think it's interesting that the value here is essentially "a jupyter notebook" but...

- Evaluations shown in a sidebar

- Automatically figures out what is a calculation and what is a comment/explanation for you

I am not saying this to minimize the app, but to marvel at how much just those things improve the UX, at least for many use cases.

Perhaps the most important difference is that expressions re-evaluate automatically on changes. You don’t have to go manually rerun all the dependent expressions, or wait for the kernel to restart, or worry that some of the results you’re seeing might be stale.

This concept has big potential. It is similar to a spreadsheet but allows the free form of data entry which may be empowering to quite a few customers out there.

For linux users there's a approximation of this idea - speedcrunch

Great little program! And it's also available for Windows and macOS.

https://heldercorreia.bitbucket.io/speedcrunch

Neat! I remember a Mac app with a similar concept from ages ago:

http://calca.io/

Glad to see something like it for the web!

I love this app on my iPhone. It seems like it has been abandoned and that is super sad. It comes in super handy when traveling and you need to convert currency and for purchases.

Show HN: Notepad Calculator – create and share back of the envelope calculations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10670343 - Dec 2015 (2 comments)

Neat! I used to use https://instacalc.com/ for simple calculations, you can share your calculations, but it doesn't have the notepad feature like this one.

Great! Best UI I have seen among similar apps. Works on phone as well.

The concept for this is awesome. I do wish I could get it as a plug-in to vs code in a similar fashion to how vs code handles jupyter notebooks

Its already cratered... but its written well enough to have been archived, and it still runs!

https://web.archive.org/web/20221228162145/https://notepadca...

Look good. I start to wonder what if Jupyter Notebook has results shown on the right.

Looks awesome. Let me plug my own, way more basic version:

https://blog.perryizgr8.com/typecalc/

Sadly I never took it as far as I wanted to.

Also working nicely both numeric and symbolic: https://smath.com (3MB windows binary or cloud version, russian freemium)

I've seen these a couple of times now and they do look pretty cool. Does anyone know if there is an Obsidian plugin that does something similar to this?

Numerals maybe?

https://github.com/gtg922r/obsidian-numerals

Looks great, thanks!

Jupyter notebooks seem to do this same thing better. This seems like it's own Lagrange to learn that's less extensible than python.

Where is the list of supported built-in functions? Perhaps adding a page documenting that would make it useful for your users.

another nice app for mac is Numi. https://numi.app/

Nice! Very similar to https://calcutext.com/

I made a notepad repl: https://replpad.com/

Uh, dark mode. Look, if you're going to overwrite the user's browser settings I suggest give, if not full theme choice, at the very least to chose from dark/white mode. I'm a light mode user, so your web app lived on my computer for less than 5 seconds.

Are note contents encrypted at all or just stored as plaintext in the cloud?

Right now they are stored as plaintext on a VPS server (or in localStorage in your browser if you aren't signed in).

I was wondering whether encryption might be compelling as a premium feature if this ever got enough users to think about monetizing it in future. What do you think?

oh cool, have to compare it to https://bbodi.github.io/notecalc3/notecalc# (once not on mobile)

This is cool. I use a Mac app called Numi that does something similar.

I bet this could be implemented as a frontend over Google Sheets

Notepad++ has NppCalc which has similar functionality. Nice work!

Make it a VSCode extension. (There's probably one already)

If you're in VSCode already, just install the Microsoft "Polyglot Notebooks" extension and get full Markdown with a multi-language .NET runtime.

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-dotne...

Sounds cool, I was about to try this but it lost me (for now at least) with the .NET SDK requirement.

QALC is a vscode extension that behaves quite similarly to this!

This is pretty cool!

This is great! Is there an offline version available?

There's no completely offline version. But if you don't sign in then none of your notes are sent to the server, they stay in localStorage in your browser.

This should have it's own file extension.

This is just a dynamic programming language.

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