A beautiful and robust calculator for the command line
This calculator depends upon GNU readline library which is installed by default in most *nix systems because bash also uses it.
If not available on your system search for a binary package named libreadline-dev
.
Or compile from source from http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/readline/ of the form regex(readline-[0-9].[0-9].tar.gz
).
Installation can be done easily by executing ./install.sh
.
Or can also be installed by the traditional make
and sudo make install
commands.
Note: Default install location/prefix is /usr/local/
. To change the location
use make PREFIX=<dir> install
-
Viewing in terminal:
groff -man -Tascii doc/man/man1/calc.1 | less
-
Exporting as pdf:
groff -man doc/man/man1/calc.1 | ps2pdf - > man_calc.pdf
-
Exporting as html:
groff -man -Thtml doc/man/man1/calc.1 > man_calc.html
Note: The man page is generally updated after a long time. So, be careful with it.
This is a problem when the color of the input/output/error/prompt is nearly close to that of the terminal's background color. This happens because, by default no background is set when the calculator is first opened. The input color is by default white so it would be problematic for people to see the input if they have a background color close to white. To change the text color use:
change input color black
Similarly, output color can be changed using:
change output color yellow
For more information use calc "help font" -q
.
If you have finished fixing your colors then add the command(s) to a file lets say,
/home/user/.calc.conf
. In turn make the calculator process the same file whenever
you open it using calc -f /home/user/.calc.conf
. If that seems long to you then
add an alias to .bashrc
lets say calc_init
using
alias calc_init='calc -f /home/user/.calc.conf'
command. After that just run
calc_init
instead of calc
to get your colors working without the need to change
colors every time you open the calculator.
Now that doesn't mean that it works only for colors. You can put in any direct
input command in /home/user/.calc.conf
to (de)activate features of the calculator.
An example file is provided in the root of the repository named .calc.config
. You
can modify it to suit your needs.