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Comment by Tabular-Iceberg | Hacker News Reader

On-screen and phone calculators seem hell-bent on replicating all the worst aspects of the absolute worst physical calculators on the market. Why would anyone want to use that?

I could of course get a more advanced calculator app, or use Maxima, but I already own a decent bitmap display calculator with scrollable history that I used in school, so using that is simply the path of least resistance.

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One of my favorites is SpeQ Mathematics (Windows) [1]. It’s free (not OSS) and doesn’t seem to be active anymore, but it still works great. It’s like a scratchpad that can calculate, without trying to emulate a physical device.

[1] https://speqmath.com/

Thanks for for the tip, but does it bring anything to the table that Maxima can’t already do?

Maxima can do things my physical calculator can’t do, like solving equations, at the expense of having to open or switch to it, as opposed to having it always ready on my desk.

But to warrant actually downloading, installing and learning a whole other application that application would need to have some pretty game-changing additional features over Maxima, and even if it does, my current needs I’m barely scratching the surface of what Maxima can do, so I would still have very little incentive to switch.

Moffsoft Freecalc works great, especially since you can copy and paste the "tape" results.

http://www.moffsoft.com/

For linux I use http://www.speedcrunch.org it's fast and simple for most things I need.

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