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Comment by marklgr | Hacker News Reader

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.

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