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Comment by jonstaab | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

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

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.

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