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.
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.
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.
[0] https://www.computerhope.com/unix/udc.htm