A Very Powerful Desktop Calculator

Hanna Knutsson has been working on a project called Qalculate! for a long time now. Hanna’s initial commit on libqalculate was in 2016 and if you look at her GitHub activity, she’s been working on it extremely consistently.

pretty much all of these are Qalculate related

It runs across different platforms too supporting Windows, Mac, and Linux. It can even run in the command line using the qalc command interactively.

image of what my Qalculate looks like just randomly

Give it a download if you intend to try it out! Personally, I recommend using the GTK versions.

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My settings

Whenever reinstalling my system, I always flick on the following settings:

• Turn on live calculation (Mode > Calculate As You Type)
• More precision (Mode > Precision > 32)
• Digit grouping to commas (Edit > Preferences > Numbers & Operators > Digit grouping > local)
• Ignore commas in numbers (Edit > Preferences > Numbers & Operators > Ignore commas in numbers)
• Show keypad and history at the same time (hit the padlock next to the word Keypad in the main screen expand history and keypad as shown in the screenshot above)

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Some capabilities

These are just some things I use Qalculate for on a day-to-day basis that I thought would be neat to include here.

• Conversion: 100USD to HKD, 25m/s to ft/min, 50KiB to GB
• Equations with x: 2^x=4096, sqrt("apple") = 2x
• Annoying to do by hand: mean(10; 20; 30), factorize(727)
• Bits and stuff: 2 << 10, ("snowflake" >> 22) + 1420070400000

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Closing Thoughts

I absolutely love this calculator and it is very clearly a work of love. It has many features and the author is responsive in GitHub issues. It’s also very capable and easy to use with documentation too!

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