Comment by orbital-decay | Hacker News Reader

Comment by orbital-decay | Hacker News Reader

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> irrelevant-in-PC physical number buttons paradigm, taking up more than half of useful UI space

Calling it irrelevant is a bit like calling vim irrelevant. Classic calculators don't use REPL, they are designed to minimize the number of keypresses required to input your problem and explore it in the intuitive manner. They use highly efficient modal input languages (kind of like vim). Besides being efficient, these languages tend to have one-off commands you have to remember. Having a cheatsheet on your screen by default is useful for discoverability. In the algebraic calculator paradigm and their typical use cases (napkin math), having a history is not very useful (unlike in RPN where having the stack on the screen is nice).

That said, Qalculate is weird in that it uses a REPL and the input line, which is much slower and clunkier than the algebraic input, but still tries to mimic a classic calculator. It's also slow to start. Not sure what's its use case, as it offers neither speed of a classic calculator nor the feature set of full-fledged math software.

This doesn't make any sense, what kind of cheatsheet do you need to discover numbers on your keyboard???

What kind of efficient modal input language is it where you have to move your hands off the keyboard and move your mouse to press a button to insert a number?

Commands, not numbers. (what is the equivalent of +/- or 1/x?) Algebraic calculators don't have a lot of useful information to display when used properly, maybe the contents of memory registers but not much else. The screen estate can be used for anything, might as well be a cheatsheet.

> where you have to move your hands off the keyboard and move your mouse to press a button

Command cheatsheet, not number cheatsheet obviously (doubling as input won't hurt). Having numbers on it is excessive, as I already said Qalculate does it the weird way.

It sems you're still talking about some idealized vim-calculator instead of this app

> Command cheatsheet, not number cheatsheet

How do sin/cos/tan/e/p/i/ln/kg/mod buttons (that take most of the screen real estate ignoring the numbers) help you "cheat"? Do they help you discover sin/cos? Or is there some shortcut label that helps you remember how to toggle some extra options without using a mouse?

You can hide the number pad from the keys. Or hide the keys entirely. Or keep them and customize which functions they activate, including custom user-defined functions.

could I keep only half of all the keys (e.g., I'd never need 0-9 or cursor keys, but then maybe ANS is useful), reoder them and attach a shortcut to each button?

Or replacing sin with the rad/degree switcher (without the dropdown)?

Yes, you can hide all the 0-9 keys. And add rad/degree buttons. And set whatever functions/settings you can have elsewhere in the UI as buttons. And add or remove columns/rows from the "keypad". The upper-left button in the custom keypad will always be to edit the custom keypad itself, otherwise it's fully modifiable by the user.

oh, that's very nice! Do you happen to know a place with a good collection of those UI customizations not to start from scratch?

> It's also slow to start.

It's launching instantly here, with cold caches.

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