Randy Ridenour has taken another step in the journey so many of are on: moving everything inside Emacs. Regular Irreal readers will recall that Ridenour is a Philosophy professor so he doesn’t have much need for high powered math tools but he does have to deal with grade calculations and various budget items. He had been using Soulver for this but, of course, this meant leaving Emacs, something all we Emacers hate.
Then he stumbled on literate-calc-mode. It did everything that Soulver did and Ridenour didn’t have to leave Emacs to use it. It’s been a win for him and he’s happy with it.
When I read Ridenour’s post, something seemed familiar. It turns out that I’d written about literate-calc-mode six years ago. It had just been released and no one had any experience with it yet. I meant to follow up but, of course, life intervened and I never did. I’m glad to see that it’s still around and has lived up to its potential.
I’m tempted to install it but I’m reasonably proficient with Calc itself so I probably wouldn’t use it enough to make it worthwhile. Still, if Reverse Polish Notation is not your thing and you’d rather deal with normal infix notation, literate-calc-mode may be a good fit. It’s easy to try out so give it a spin if you’re interested.