calculator

I don’t like the new calculator in Windows. Mainly because it cannot be used fully with only the keyboard.

In the old calculator; doing a simple calculation with an exponent could be done with the caret character (like this: 5^2 = 25), but now this requires using an on-screen button.

I dislike the calculator so much that I removed it and started doing my calculations in the command line. To add some power and to make it simpler, I wrote a little perl script:

#!perl

use 5.030;
use strict;
use Math::Trig;

our $help = "Type expression and press enter.
Start expression with operator to apply it to the previous result. 
Press Ctrl+C to exit.";

our $pi = pi(); 
while(1){
    print "#";
    chomp(my $expression = <STDIN>);
    if ($expression =~ /help|\-h/g ) {
        say $help;
        next;
    }
    $expression =~ s/pi/$pi/g;
    if( $expression =~ /^[\*\-\+\/\%\&\|\^\~\<\>]/ ){
        $expression = $_.$expression;
    }
    $_ = eval($expression);
    say;
}

^ is a bitwise operator in Perl, so to do exponents I have to use **.

However, There’s More Than One Way To Do It; here’s a one-liner that’ll do the trick, and in some ways it’s even more powerful: perl -E 'while(<STDIN>){say eval, "\n";}

This lets you type in any Perl code and evaluate the result directly in the command line. Press Ctrl+C to get out of it.

Then I discovered microsoft/PowerToys, with its Run toy which has a built in calculator that can be brough up by pressing Alt+Space. This is what I use now.