Literate Calc Mode

Robin Schroer has an interesting project that recently landed in MELPA. Many of you know that I’m a big fan of reproducible research and its handmaiden literate programming. Schroer’s project is a sort of light-weight Jupyter Notebook that’s integrated with Emacs. He’s got a post that announced the project and explained what it’s about.

There’s a video with his post but I couldn’t get it to play. That may because I’m on macOS or perhaps because of my anti-tracking software. In either case, the README at the Git repository provides some nice examples of how it works. If you can’t play the video either, take a look at the repository. It will help you understand the project and its aims.

I’m really comfortable with calc and don’t feel the need for an infix calculator but literate calc mode does have some nice features. For instance, you can capture the result of a calculation in a variable and if you change any constituent part, all the results are recalculated. Even better, it’s possible to capture the whole thing to a text file so it can be published or reloaded later for more work.

It’s still early days and Schroer has some enhancements planned. I think this is going to be a really useful project for Emacs users.

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