Reminds me a little of [Numi](https://numi.app/). It doesn't exactly like plain text, but will happily eat it, but loves the math part. Seems this is the opposite of that, loves the text, but will happily digest math.
You should use whichever tool you prefer, of course. But it sounds like you're asking about how Calculist is different than Org-mode. The two have a lot of overlapping functionality, but Calculist is a little more friendly and approachable for non-techy people, and it has a cloud-based web version for collaboration (in addition to the local desktop version). There are other differences, but those are the main ones that come to mind.
The “more friendly” claim needs to be backed up with experience. I don’t think any of the similar products (numi, Calca, …) have reached a wider audience than Org. Excel, of course, continues to dominate the space, despite being much more complicated than all these tools combined.
The web version is not for collaboration, it’s for subscription income.
Looks great. But when solving a multi-step calculation problem, what is the unique selling point of your product vs jupyter notebook or google colab? Thanks
Calculist is more lightweight than Jupyter or Google Colab, and it's more note-taking oriented than data processing oriented. It's more of a handy thinking tool than a complete computing environment.
Very cool. I use plaintext lists for virtually everything. But generally, they're on my phone. I use Safe Notes, which allows you to encrypt individual notes. I wouldn't want to keep them in the cloud, and I use DDG browser so I'm not keeping a lot of local storage hanging around.
I would absolutely purchase this if it were packaged as an Android app.
FWIW I've had multiple data loss issues with Safe Notes. Sometimes one notepad would spontaneously get overwritten by another. I've switched to Simple Notepad since then.
I use (paid) Arq on the desktop for similar purposes, sending encrypted backups to a server I control. I don't know of a similar Android solution for self-hosted incremental backups.
I’m wondering if this is intended to become a place to publish public notebooks like observablehq.com? I think Observable benefits a lot from having lots of other people’s notebooks to use as inspiration.
I'm working on creating more resources now (videos, templates, better documentation, etc.), and I'll be updating the site accordingly in the coming days.
Can you demonstrate how to use Calculist to solve a specific problem?
I tried the demo and expanded the items in the sample document. I saw examples of calculation! So I’d love to see examples of problem solving with Calculist.
Hi, Couldn't try as download wasn't available but seems like a great tool from reading other comments. Btw, the GitHub sources are 4 years old and so is the latest release; Are you renewing the project again?
I'm currently brainstorming a notes platform for second order thinking[1], Say like a community submitted scenarios for second-order, third-order thinking. Would Calculist be a good fit for such notes?
It can be compiled to HTML and when viewed in a suitable viewer could be considered rich text, but markdown files are plaintext. Code sourcefiles are also plaintext. However, I think there should be another term (clean text?) that refers to text abscent of symbols which represent the markup. It would aid in conversation. For instance you might want to parse an HTML formatted document and be left with just the words and certain punctuation, or clean text (or something).
In the more distant past, when we didn't have a lot of "markup formats", "plain text format" just meant the opposite of "binary format", where "plain" was just emphasising its human readability.
But I wrote my first BASIC program around the age of 7, in 1984 and the first and shortly after learnt Forth on a ZX Spectrum. So that's my perspective.
We wrote programs, which controlled a Roland DG DXY-880. That also used a plain text programing language.
I was not speaking a lot of English at that time, so mirror translating back from Hungarian, we said, "textual format" or "plain, textual format" ("síma, szöveges formátum"), to contrast its simplicity with binary formats.
(I was born and raised in Szeged though, so that could be just our regional dialect. How about you?)
I'm not sure I like the analogy as a proof this can't be plain text; my professors and I would often use LaTeX snippets when communicating over plain-text mediums like e-mail -- not to later render into something nicer, but left as-is since it fit the problem domain well and allowed us to quickly communicate ideas that needed some degree of precision. Even if you're firmly in the "code can't be plain text" camp I think you'll agree that LaTeX used in that fashion still counts.
Interesting edge case, this one. Rich text is commonly called that because there is a GUI editor that transparently converts the markup to different styles.
However, that clearly doesn’t apply to markup that is common enough to become a medium of communication.
Then, the question is, where to draw the line? One could argue that markdown only provides minimal semantic structure, and as such is akin to punctuation, which hasn’t always existed in ”plain text”, either.
I think some new categories are needed. Effectively, the standard ones would be something like:
1. Unstructured text: edited and viewed in plain text editor, formatting limited to whitespace
2. Rich text: edited and viewed in GUI editor with unconstrained structured and unstructured formatting
3. Structured text: markdown, LaTeX, etc. Edited as plain text with minimal markup, viewed by rendering source document in GUI, with automatic formatting based on structure and chosen style
4a. Program code, human-written and -readable
4b. Program code, automatically generated (JS bundles, etc)
Thus, representations such as SGML, RTF, HTML, XML, wiki markup, and TeX, as well as nearly all programming language source code files, are considered plain text. The particular content is irrelevant to whether a file is plain text. For example, an SVG file can express drawings or even bitmapped graphics, but is still plain text.:
Since this project is not really active, if you are looking for a modern take on fully local WYSIWYG note taking where you own the files, I highly recommend checking out my project https://bangle.io.
- It is fully local web app .. no servers no data hoarding.
- No proprietary format, it saves your notes in markdown in your computer.
- It is WYSIWYG editor so that you don't have to switch context.
