Over at the Calculator Culture Youtube Channel they have a nice Introductory video on the GNU Emacs calculator otherwise known as Calc. The thing about Calc is that’s it’s gigantic. It’s not Mathematica but it seems like it can do practically anything mathematical that you need.
The problem with Calc is neatly captured by Karthink in a reddit comment:
“The problem with Calc is that it’s got a big learning curve for anything more than simple arithmetic, and it doesn’t stick in the head because of the terse and arcane UI (even for Emacs) for the higher level functions. I have to relearn how to access most of the above every time I fire it up.”
This is exactly what I find. Calc does so much that I find it impossible to remember most of the advanced features unless I’m using one of them constantly. As soon as I stop that constant use, I forget the more abstruse parts.
The video is only 13 minutes, 21 seconds long so it doesn’t begin to cover all of Calc but it does give you an idea of some of what it can do. The good news is that it’s easy to learn and remember the basic functions so you always have a useful calculator at hand when you’re in Emacs. I use it as my desktop calculator and couldn’t be happier with it.