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Comment by daturkel | Hacker News Reader

I personally use Numi, which is very similar. I like the ability to assign variables and reuse them (and change the value of the variable on the fly, instantly redoing all other calculations).

https://numi.io/

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I use tydig[1] on my iPad which is really nice. Especially being able to drag around results with links pointing back to them and then graphing things as needed.

[1] http://tydligapp.com/

For 1.99 that’s not shabby. The iPad app looks great too, like finding more ways to make my iPad useful for work.

Seconded (though I'm tentatively switching to dc[0], reverse polish notation ftw), can anyone who has used both Numi and Soulver point out the differences between the two? They look super similar to me.

[0] https://www.computerhope.com/unix/udc.htm

Soulver has iOS apps too.

Sadly, I am Android-only. Is there any difference in functionality, or it a pure clone (edit: or, is Numi the clone? Sound like Soulver has been around a while)?

I’ve never used Numi. Soulver is 14 years old and is from my favorite era of indie macOS development. He’s really responsive on twitter or to bug reports/emails.

Numi is also available in Setapp [1], which I pay for and really love (it’s a great value for me), but I must admit I’ve never used it. I’ll check it out later today, but don’t know if I can offer a comprehensive pro/con.

[1]: https://setapp.com

Pretty much identical to the desktop apps, all docs sync nicely.

I like dc too, and wrote this plugin for Vim: https://github.com/fcpg/vim-colddeck

The power of old tools :)

For me the currency conversion, easy ‘totalling’, syntax highlighting, and mixing Markdown text inline (which gets ignored) is the key feature for these notepad/numi apps.

These still could be done in Vim but it’s more than just a unixy calculator or text-editor spreadsheet.

To each his own I guess. As far as I'm concerned, I'm mainly interested in the one-column spreadsheet, tweaking a few input rows and checking how it impacts some other rows. I still use instacalc from time to time, but now I often reach for vim instead.

I started hacking something up to invoke dc more easily…

  $ . calc.sh
  $ * 4 5
  20
  $ / 21 3
  7

It’s a WIP. I’ll probably add floating point and a stack. Which will mean moving away from `dc` to awk/python/something else running in the background, using sh co-processes.

If you like dc, give Emacs' calc mode a try.

The main difference is that you can easily drag n drop line result anywhere inside the document with Soulver for more complex computations. With Numi you are forced to make up variable names, which is silly.

I have written to Numi author about this a few months ago and he replied he wants to add this feature to Numi but I haven’t heard any news about that since. I am not following Numi closely, though.

There is also Calca on the Mac.

Calca is excellent

Yes!

I prefer Calca. I just find variables easier to deal with. I used it most recently when I was working the food table at my kid’s school fete, and I didn’t have a point of sale. Just do all my calculations with variables so it was easier to spot errors. (Kids spending their own pocket money are ruthless at challenging your math).

I used to use Numi heavily, but I was forced to abandon it because there never will be a Windows version (I even asked the dev, he said no).

Sad, because its elegant as fuck.

Soulver can do that too.

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