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A plain text note-taking system for problem solving
- flitzofolov 5y agoThis is very cool! It would be neat to see more examples of it in use. I didn't see any sort of example gallery.
- danallison 5y agoI'm working on creating more resources now (videos, templates, better documentation, etc.), and I'll be updating the site accordingly in the coming days.
- hirundo 5y agoThis is the MVP of Roam.
- danallison 5y agoRoam is more oriented towards networked thought and knowledge management. Calculist is geared more towards problem solving and calculation.
- rrherr 5y agoCan 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.
- danallison 5y agoThis video gives an example of solving a basic math problem: https://youtu.be/ctSeZpJsyCk https://youtu.be/ctSeZpJsyCk
- akkartik 5y agoI can't tell how to use the defining forms at https://calculist.io/markup https://calculist.io/markup. These work: * \= 2*3 * \(x, y) = x+y However I'm not sure how to define a new function. Here's what I tried: * \: foo (x, y) = x+y # no error * \=foo(2, 3) # error * \:barr = 2*3 # no error * \=barr # error
- danallison 5y agofoo\(x, y) = x + y \= foo(2, 3)
- akkartik 5y agoThanks!
- fouc 5y agoI had trouble finding documentation, is it possible to collapse/expand the text tree from the keyboard? Are there other keyboard commands?
- danallison 5y agoYes. Ctrl + spacebar to expand/collapse. There's slightly outdated documentation on github: https://github.com/calculist/calculist/wiki/Keyboard-Shortcuts https://github.com/calculist/calculist/wiki/Keyboard-Shortcu... I'm working on getting things updated now. More documentation will be available over the next few weeks.
- fouc 5y agoIt might be good to temporarily add a link on the main site for the documentation at https://github.com/calculist/calculist/wiki https://github.com/calculist/calculist/wiki
- danallison 5y agoDone. Thank you for the suggestion.
- zie 5y agoReminds me a little of [Numi](https://numi.app/ 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.
- skybrian 5y agoI’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.
- danallison 5y agoPublic documents will eventually be a supported feature, yes.
- User23 5y agoWhy would I use this instead of org-mode (and babel) and maybe org-roam?
- danallison 5y agoYou 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.
- akho 5y agoThe “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.
- noduerme 5y agoVery 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.
- danallison 5y agoNoted. A standalone mobile app is low on the dev priorities list right now, but hopefully we'll get to it someday. Also, the desktop app (which will be available within the next few days) is 100% local, no internet connection necessary, and 100% private.
- jbay808 5y agoFWIW 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.
- noduerme 5y agoEek.. I've been using it for a couple years and haven't run into that, but good to know!
- koheripbal 5y agoI use WinSCP to maintain an encrypted remote directory of markdown files for notes and projects. It's nice to let separate programs do the encryption/storage vs the editing.
- noduerme 5y agoI 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.
- andrew_jef 5y agoLooks 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
- danallison 5y agoCalculist 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.
- kushan2020 5y agoSince 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 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.
- danallison 5y agoCalculist is very much active.
- reificator 5y ago> - It is WYSIWYG editor so that you don't have to switch context. Funny, avoiding context switches is why I keep everything in plaintext...
- tunesmith 5y agoVery interesting - if it's a Desktop app it could replace my usage of Calca.
- danallison 5y agoThe desktop app will be released within the next few days.
- Royi 5y agoCould you make a portable version for Windows? Maybe even work with PortableApps (It will increase exposure).
- kissgyorgy 5y agoThis is not plain text. Plain text by definition is plain. It's like calling LaTeX plain text.
- danallison 5y agoCalculist is plain text in the same way that markdown is plain text. Calculist is not WYSIWYG.
- capableweb 5y agoThat's why Calculist is not actually plain text. Markdown is not plain text! > Markdown is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted text > Markdown, the simple and easy-to-use markup language > Markdown's syntax is intended for one purpose: to be used as a format for writing for the web It's formatted text or also called rich text.
- afarviral 5y agoIt 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).
- kissgyorgy 5y agoIf code source files are plain text, I'm a bacteria.
- Abishek_Muthian 5y agoHi, 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? [1] https://needgap.com/problems/263-plan-second-order-third-order-consequences-mentalmodel-cognitivescience https://needgap.com/problems/263-plan-second-order-third-ord... (Disclaimer: My platform)
- lcnmrn 5y agoMath.js does the same thing. Demo on lucianmarin.com/num for some math, works on the phone too.
- stakkur 5y agoI think the term ‘plain text’ has evolved from its original meaning. Today, it seems to mean “can be opened in a text editor”.