QwikTape: Do calculations, annotate like you would on a paper | Hacker News Reader

QwikTape: Do calculations, annotate like you would on a paper

github.com

108 pointsstareatgoats29 comments

On OSX, Soulver is great:

Very useful for building worksheets and exploring formulas.

I like Soulver, but I've found Calca to be a better fit for my needs. It supports graphing, unbound functions, and more advanced math support. Its UI is more minimal and the rendering isn't as nice as Soulver, but I find I'm able to iterate with it a lot faster.

I'm trying out QuikTape now, but it had to clone 1.6GiB. When I launch on macOS I am not able to actually type into the UI, and the window doesn't show as an app in the dock. Perhaps it's more functional on Linux.

I'm still waiting for an app that can properly do real units/dimensional analysis and good date math (`today + 3 business days`).

I like Calca too better too. This is one of those crowded spaces that still feels like it has room for something else to come along and truly nail it, though. I find myself reaching for Calca, local Jupyter, ObservableHQ, and local Quarto in VsCode all for slightly different reasons.

> I'm trying out QuikTape now, but it had to clone 1.6GiB.

How far we’ve come from awk scripts that are about 1kiB (https://c2.com/doc/expense/)

> and good date math (`today + 3 business days`)

That’s tricky/impossible in international teams.

Ohh interesting,

1.6 Gib is the SDK with all the documentation, the final builds are comparatively tiny.

Can you try the prebuilt from releases for macOS?

BTW, I tried downloading this but it didn't have a file extension. I suppose I could have figured it out by looking at the internals, but I wasn't sure if it was a pkg or an app or what.

It's binary you could `chmod +x qwiktape` and execute it, I've made note in the readme about it.

File extensions on everything are a Windows-ism (originally a DOS-ism). Why do you expect them on files specific to other platforms?

I use Soulver every day and definitely recommend it

I love seeing all the related apps folks are posting. I built one myself, Tap [1], and can confirm: they are fun to build and useful!

Tap formulas can reference other formulas, so combining discreet calculations in different ways is less repetition. They can also refer to the value of accounts within the Tap system. So if you keep track of spending or other commodities you can refer to the value of those accounts (in total or across specific time ranges) in formulas.

1. https://tatatap.com

Emacs has literate-calc-mode which I use with org-mode: https://github.com/sulami/literate-calc-mode.el

I made a list of calculators like this which were shared here on HN over time https://gist.github.com/SMUsamaShah/6546011091d53380354484a3... (there aren't many)

From these https://bbodi.github.io/notecalc3/ and https://notepadcalculator.com/ are the most programmer friendly (supporting <<, ^, binary, hex etc)

Hi everyone, Author here would love to answer any queries.

I really like the app, it's snappy and works great with a small footprint, at least on Windows.

I confess I was also intrigued by the use of Sciter as a platform, so I guess a question could be if you would recommend that for crossplatform apps, or if you came across things that "surprised" you along the way?

Well few of the surprises in sciter SDK were solved by the author of Sciter Andrew,

Sciter development is mostly development-on-demand, so any bugs or feature gets resolved on interest. I've not faced any major issue with it.

Love the app. However on Debian 11 host with xfce desktop the deb package binary manages to crash XOrg when one resizes the window! Just FYI, I might dig into how it accomplishes such a feat as your app is absolutely amazing idea, ver helpful.

I'll have a look into it.

I put it inside an xpra session for now. It’s a really useful app. Thank you.

The X server crash looks like it’s something related to vulcan. My debian 11 machine is a bit odd as it has 2 gpus, one nvidia one amd and I’m using only free video drivers. If I find time to debug it and get an Xorg stack trace I’ll get it to you.

Although I see those perform the calculation on the side, instead of inline. Interesting.

In a related note, I love the cross-platform app SpeedCrunch as a "basic" calculator. It has an option to auto-copy the result to the clipboard, and you can also set/use variables. It also cold-opens immidiately.

I put something like this together: https://solvy.app/ – really fun project. my goal was to make it collaborative and real-time. Might still do that someday.

My favorite calculator is OpalCalc:

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

What's the usecase for apps like this?

It seems like it is made for low complexity stuff, which I usually calculate in the fly. Anything more advanced will go into Excel.

In my case, the words help with self-documenting; knowing why I'm doing the calculations I'm doing.

I feel like over time, I spend a lot of time going over old Excel spreadsheets exploring the formulas I've put together and wondering what I was thinking, re-learning how they work, wishing I had something there to explain it that is more than just those "Attach notes to cell" things. In some of my spreadsheets, I've actually taken to writing docs in a separate markdown app, and then taking screenshots of the rendered pdf and pasting them into Excel. It's clunky.

This could be a good transition from a spreadsheet to a report. I wonder how data binding could work for that?

My initial thoughts were how does a spreadsheet do it? but it's a different kind of beast.

In search of a parser toolkit I had come across this https://github.com/handsontable/hyperformula which uses chevrotain to parse spreadsheet formulas and decided to use chevrotain for the parsing.

Sounds interesting. Can you make a tutorial video on YouTube?

Does it really need a tutorial video? I've made an `Introduction` document that opens on first use ,which is self explanatory.

A bit like Numi.app for Mac. Neat.

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