Fun fact about SpeedCrunch history, the software descends from an off-hand blog post by Roberto Alsina, a KDE developer, complaining about KCalc usability [1]. Back then developers were often just unthinkingly cloning 'skeuomorphic' interfaces like Apple used back then, designing user interfaces that resembled physical objects instead of taking advantage of the opportunities afforded by computers.

His blog post elicited several rapid responses from developers taking his PyQt-based mockup and turning it into a 'real' application ([2], [3]). One of those was Ariya Hidayat's "SpeedCrunch", which has been actively maintained up to the present day. I can't find Ariya's original 2004 announcement, I think the original link was http://ariya.pandu.org/blog/archives/2004/10/calculator-feve... but that's dead now.

But it's really neat to see how this all started from a day or two of hacking on a solution to a simple problem.

[1] https://ralsina.me/stories/33.html [2] https://ralsina.me/weblog/posts/P245.html [3] https://ralsina.me/weblog/posts/P247.html

I used to use this back when I mained Windows. Ever since moving primarily to Linux, and getting familiar with Emacs, Calc mode simply beats every calculator I've ever used in total functionality. However, there are certain cases where I also like to use https://insect.sh if lots of units are involved.

I LOVE SpeedCrunch. I do not need a calculator very often, but when I do, this is my calculator of choice. It doesn't support graphing, but it understands units, which is both useful and cool.

I like the UI, too, for being simple but very much functional without getting in my way. And it supports a persistent history across sessions, which I also like.

SpeedCrunch looks very promising, and I've used it a lot in the past. I'm sad to see that they still haven't released the order of operations bug fix [0] they made in 2017.

SpeedCrunch does some operations in an order most people wouldn't expect. For example, SpeedCrunch says 1/2(-9.8) = -0.05102040816326530612

[0] - https://bitbucket.org/heldercorreia/speedcrunch/commits/ac49...

Am I a weirdo for using the console (F12) in my browser for calculating stuff like tips, rent/utilities for the month, and other such things? Lol.

I love SpeedCrunch, especially for dealing with different bases. For back-of-the-napkin type math, OpalCalc is my favorite.

https://skytopia.com/software/opalcalc/

Their demo of their efficient interface compared to GNU Calc:

  SC: 5+8 Enter [4 keys, 1 shift]
  Calc: 5 RET 8 + [4 keys, 1 shift]
  SC: 5*(113+23) Enter [11 keys, 3 shifts]
  Calc: 5 RET 113 RET 23 + * [10 keys, 1 shift]
  SC: 7*ans Enter [6 keys, 1 shift]
  Calc: 7 * [2 keys, 1 shift]
  SC: sqrt(1231+41) Enter [14 keys, 3 shift]
  Calc: 1231 RET 41 + Q [9 keys, 1 shift]

Maybe it’s more efficient than clicking buttons with a mouse but it doesn’t feel more efficient than the calculator I already use, nor does it seem to be better integrated with the software I use. It doesn’t even seem more efficient than the scientific calculator I used in high school.

I think I’m put off more by the lack of graphing and (as far as I could tell skimming their site) array/vector/matrix functions, which are the main things I do with Calc.

A small plug for my own script: I'm proud to present the most useful, least-work script I've ever written: `math`

https://github.com/shawwn/scrap/blob/master/math

  #!/bin/sh

  scale=4 # results will print to the 4th decimal
  echo "scale=$scale; $@" | bc -l

It just yeets all its arguments into bc -l, so you can run math 1+2-3 or math '(1024 - 7)*10' or whatever else you want. I even use it in other shell scripts, since bash's math facilities are rather limited and inconsistent across sh vs bash.

  :~$ echo $(((3+4)*5))
  35
  :~$ echo $(((3+4)*5/1024))
  0
  :~$ math '((3+4)*5/1024)'
  .0341

It has all the precision you want, as long as you only want results up to the 4th decimal.

It's surprising how much I use it. I find myself absentmindedly typing out math 220*1024*1024 while talking to people in meetings (what, you don't have meetings where it's crucial to know how quickly 220MB can be transferred?) and like thousands of other situations.

Meanwhile, funny story: I bought an iPad recently, and discovered that it's a delightful way to pass the time while shopping. You can stick it in your cart and pull up 3blue1brown and zone out while getting your pineapples. So I was doing that, and I went to reach for the calculator app to figure something out, and discovered that there is no calculator on iPads.

The punchline is that if you want a calculator on an iPad, it'll either cost you $5 or your soul: https://i.imgur.com/CJsDtB0.jpg

Someone please make SpeedCrunch, but MsPaint. I miss MsPaint every day. There's an OS X app called Paintbrush which is similar, but unfortunately quite buggy and somehow even more limited in certain respects. Being able to just paste a screenshot and draw a red circle within 5 seconds is something that I wish we could do in 2022. Nay, I say that it's our right as programmers to be able to do that. </rallying cry>

EDIT: formatting. TIL you can backslash-escape asterisks on HN.

This would be amazing on iOS.

I saw an issues thread from 2017 (https://bitbucket.org/heldercorreia/speedcrunch/issues/702/s...) that discussed porting to iOS but nothing since.

What are the GPL implications of porting this to Swift even with putting all source on a public GitHub/BitBucket repo because of the App Store?

Ever since Windows released their embarrassing touch-friendly calculator app which takes 1+ seconds to start, SpeedCrunch has been my goto across platforms.

I was recently doing some (silly) combinatorical math, where I wanted to know factorial(400_000) and SpeedCrunch happily produced the answer immediately. Incredibly satisfied.

Also in this space is insect: https://github.com/sharkdp/insect and https://www.insect.sh/

The Python repl / console also makes a great desk calculator (for those who haven't thought to use it that way) .

I've been using this as my Linux GUI calculator for a while (maybe a decade?). It's a good blend of functionality and simplicity and after I started using it I literally haven't looked for anything else.

A little bit jank, but there is also a port for android available[0]. It still has SI prefixes and unit conversion, but you need to have a good keyboard to really take advantage of it. [0] https://github.com/mikkosyrja/speedcrunch-android

I loved this on Windows but haven't used it since switching to macOS since it seems to not support Retina screens very well, anyone know of a workaround?

I love SpeedCrunch on Windows, but for MacOS I prefer Numi

https://numi.app/

One thing I do not like about Speedcrunch: there is a slight delay between pressing enter and showing the result, just enough to be noticed.

Speedcrunch is amazing.

I often have to do many simple calculations (adding numbers from a pdf,...) and having full history and being able to keep speedcrunch over the other windows is perfect. I also increased font-size dramatically to improve readability on big screens.

Sure, there are more advanced tools. But the simplicity and lightness on ressources is what makes it my go-to calculator.

After trying a lot of different calculators, I just settled on this little shell script to launch/raise a nodejs repl with FN+Backpspace:

  if [ $(xdotool search --name "calc repl") ]; then
   xdotool search --name "calc repl" windowraise
  else
   xfce4-terminal \
    --title="calc repl" \
    --color-bg=#123 \
    --color-text=#fec \
    --hide-scrollbar \
    --font="Deja Vu Sans Mono 14px" \
    --geometry 40x14 \
    --execute node -i -e "$JSREPL"
  fi

($JSREPL just contains some extra functions that I want in a calculator)

I can easily go back to previous calculations and results, define vars, run loops whatevs. Having it on a key combo and launching the terminal with a distinct text/bg color really makes a difference. It also launches faster than most other calculators I tried. For my purposes (non-scientific, mostly programming stuff), it's been great.

Whoa, I didn't realize it had color themes and font options on top of everything else. I just subbed it in for my normal calculator software shortcut, this is great. Thanks for posting op.

(Edit: The HTML export feature even preserves the color theme. It's a web publishing tool now! Hahaha)

Love it. Use it as my default calculator when I need one occasionally. I would love to see support for plotting graphs and solving equations. Also a more touch friendly UI would be nice when using my 2-in1 laptop in tablet mode when doing math excercises for uni.

This is one of the tools that I use everyday but I don't appreciate it much because it always works for me and I don't think twice.

Thank you to the authors for working on it. Time to send them a donation!

I wanted to like this, but when I tried it on Windows, setting the font size and/or color theme made the input bar/expression editor disappear. Absolutely nothing would bring it back, not changing the settings back or even uninstalling and reinstalling. I assume it works better in a linux.

(I'd report a bug, but a calculator program making itself unusable in less than a minute with steps I can't precisely recreate kinda kills my enthusiasm for that process.)

I love SpeedCrunch, but lately I've been using Kalker on the command line: https://kalker.xyz/

It's written in Rust ;-)

It would be nice to know how numeric types are implemented, especially for something advertised as high-precision. Does it use some arbitrary precision floats or what?

This looks great but I wish it had some of the features that NaSC [0] has. It's a really amazing tool but it's awfully crashy to the point where it's barely usable. That being said being able to say `solve(... = 512 MiB)` and getting an answer is unbelievably amazing.

[0] - https://appcenter.elementary.io/com.github.parnold-x.nasc/

Somehow, it seems speedcrunch has a problem in dealing with big numbers. For example, I can do:

(3(7^204+7^202+7^200)+7(3^204+3^200)-210) mod 10

in the calculator that comes with linux and get the right result (which is 7), but speedcrunch overflows and outputs 0. I've set the result format to fixed decimal and precision to 50 digits, but that doesn't seem to make a difference.

Edit: Just tried it with insect, which also gets it wrong.

I've used it in the past, until one day they removed the buttons/skeuomorphic UI. A couple of years ago, I found it again and is now my daiky driver. It has a newer skeuomorphic interface, which I only use if I can't remember the name of a function.

What I like the most is the seamless integration of different notation styles, mainly using commas and points as decimal separators.

This looks cool! I have been using qalculate (https://qalculate.github.io/) recently, which seems similar. Has anyone used both and can tell me how they compare?

It also looks a lot like CCalc http://www.zoesoft.com/console-calculator/ccalc-screenshots/ which is available since 2005.

This seems really cool (esp. WRT unit conversions), but I'm already pretty entrenched in using Excel, R, or Python for calculations, since I usually already have one or more of those open. Is it worth learning another tool to pick up something like this?

This is a great piece of software that's installed on all my machines!

I just press Cmd-Option-J (or F12 or whatever your browser's hotkey for that is) and the browser's devtools console opens. I can type expressions there.

I recently created web version with builtin currency rates and some crypto

https://numbr.dev

Are there anything similar to iOS? Currently using Wolfram Alpha

I just use GHCi as my calculator. Works great!

Their macOS download link is broken. Oh well.

`bc` would be great interactively

Is a decent scientific calculator simply a missing feature on Google?

echo "expression" | bc -l

:)