Show HN: AlexCalc, a scientific calculator with LaTeX equation display

> I've setup my keyboard (on linux) so that the CAPS-LOCK key acts as a "dead greek" composer. If I press "CAPSLOCK+a" it types "α", and so on.

Cool! Is this because you type a lot of Greek (or math)?

> My unpopular opinion is that typing "alpha" should compute the product of the five values, equivalent to "a^2lph".

I wouldn't call it an unpopular opinion, that's how my physical graphing calculator worked, though it only had single letter variable names. The programmer in me likes my current way, though the (nearly long gone) engineering student cringes when I have to write things like "i*2*pi*f".

If people were mostly universally happy with single letter variable names then I could probably switch to this. If they were space separated then it would be a fairly simple change (except for the way units works, is "1 s" 1 times variable s, or 1 second? This is why I don't support 1 m/s to mean metre per second, it means "1 metre divided by variable s". 1 metre per second is "1 m s^-1").

I tried to compromise by making the UI automatically enter a multiplication symbol when entering tokens that aren't valid.

Perhaps if I added an additional input layer when typing then this would be feasible. Maybe something like pressing a special character, then typing "alpha" will convert it to the alpha character, and non greek letter variables could be wrapped in quotes or square brackets or something.

The one thing that would be lost is the ability to name a variable "x2". Maybe that's fine since "x_2" would still work.

As an update on unicode parsing, I still think it should be easy, but I'm running into issues. I quickly tried https://stackoverflow.com/a/11255698/9596600 but I'm seeing this:

    terminate called after throwing an instance of 'std::regex_error'
      what():  Unexpected escape character.

I suspect I just need to dig in on how to use these extended regexes (and remove some of my existing regexes). This weekend I might have more time to try it.

Nice project. It's pretty similar to my project CalcuLaTeX (https://calcula.tech) although I think the intended usecase is slightly different

Thanks! And that is so cool! It looks like the intended use case of this is to generate documents or short snippets of LaTeX, but not have to hard code the answers?

I wish I had something like this back when I actually wrote reports and stuff in LaTeX. Now I barely have any use case for my own calculator, except occasional unit conversions.

The use case that I had in mind for mine was electrical engineering students, where I had to often use complex numbers in polar form, in degrees, for circuit questions. My calculator at the time had no obvious way of entering polar complex numbers in degrees, I ended up typing things like `e^(i*angle/1r)`, where the r was "radian", and when the calculator was in degrees mode, "1 r" would evaluate to "180/pi".

It was also cumbersome to write long expressions for. It showed something like 24 characters per line, enough that I'd often get multi line expressions. These expressions would be full of brackets, and sometimes I'd hit enter and not be sure if I missed a bracket. (Hence my goal of having a LaTeX display to show you what you're entering).

Yeah, I made it to do my chemistry homework where a lot of problems were duplicated with different numbers. The truth is that it's not well tested outside of that though so it's hard to trust for complicated stuff. I might end up using yours :)

Thanks a lot! I see now, I am able to reproduce the issue if I go into chrome://flags, search for "Auto Dark Mode for Web Contents", and select "Enabled with simple HSL-based inversion". Just choosing "Enabled" seemed to break the LaTeX entirely. (Please let me know if that isn't roughly what you did)

I don't know how I'll fix this (I've never really debugged mobile web specific stuff before), but I'll look into it this weekend.

There must be a way to fix it, since I don't see the issue when going to https://www.mathjax.org/#demo and entering something like this: $$\frac{1}{\sqrt{2}}$$

EDIT: I actually have no idea why this would be happening, unless there is some sort of metadata that I should be providing on the page to tell chrome how to enable dark mode on my content. I don't think I'm messing with the styling on the web version at all.