Calc Tutorial

Longtime Irreal readers with good memories will recall that sometime ago I resolved to get better with Emacs Calc. Although I haven’t written much about it, I have been making progress. It’s now my go-to calculator and I’ve learned all the command keys for the things I do regularly. Of course, Calc is enormously flexible and complicated: it can even calculate indefinite integrals in closed form so there’s too much (for me) to remember. Fortunately there’s a nice cheat sheet, which I have bookmarked. That and the x command that I wrote about previously usually suffices to let me navigate the wonders of Calc.

Still, it’s nice to have a good tutorial to get you acquainted with what’s possible. Andrew Hyatt wrote a series of tutorials for the Google G+ Emacs Community but G+ is going away soon so Hyatt moved them to GitHub. There are 13 tutorials, all in the form of Org files. It’s easy and convenient to read them directly from the repository but if you want a local copy, just clone the repository and read them with Org-mode.

The tutorials are well written and I already learned something new: you can use Calc to generate high quality¹ random numbers. Hyatt says he uses it every time he needs a random number. The tutorials are fairly short and it’s easy to read one when you have a couple of minutes. It’s a good way of getting more familiar with Calc