[CrendKing]

The one thing I don't get about all those calculator applications is the existence of the keypad. Like, the users already have the keypad right in front them called keyboard (the names literally share the "key" part). Why would anyone instead choose to use mouse to click those tiny buttons? I feel most calc designers still stuck at the skeuomorphism and never jump out of the box to think about what user really needs.

The only calculators I know that makes keypad optional/hideable are SpeedCrunch and Qalculate!, and now this.

[mewse]

“skeuomorphism” isn’t even a real UX concept; it’s just been carefully designed to look like one.

[Bud]

Well played.

[Etherlord87]

I am a Windows power user, and the default Windows calculator is one of very few programs bundled with the OS that I actually use - and I use it quite frequently.

And I click on the number digits.

Why?

1. Usually I only click on a few buttons, for example I paste some number, then press / then 2, and then typically ENTER key on the numpad (because I can just press it with the thumb of the hand still holding the mouse). Why should I move my hand from the mouse to the keyboard in order to just press two keys? And then I would also need to check if Num Lock is enabled.

2. I had a phase trying Emacs and Vim and eventually decided I don't care about being more efficient at text editing. I want to edit the text effortlessly, and I find selecting text with mouse, or pressing arrow keys repeatedly, actually requiring less effort from me. Yes, it takes more time, but it's not a time lost, I'm thinking about some problem, and no part of my brain needs to think what kind of text editing function I should use. Likewise, clicking a few buttons in a calculator takes more time, but it's not a race. If I have to make a lot of calculations, I'm more likely to use Excel, so it's rare that I actually type stuff into the calculator.

3. Sometimes my left hand is simply not available (I'm petting my dog or eating something or maybe holding my laptop), and while I have a numpad, using functions like sine would require my right hand to travel. In similar vein, sometimes instead of Ctrl+clicking on a link to open it in a new tab, I just right-click, and choose a context option. It does annoy me slightly, but sometimes not enough to start using my left hand.

[CrendKing]

Your use cases are valid and should be respected and supported. What I was saying is, there are other people who prefer keyboard for efficiency, and they don't need keypad. Make it optional and hideable so that all users are happy. It's very simple change in terms of code diff, but it seems very hard in terms of design choice since even Microsoft doesn't get it.

[paledot]

Making the keypad optional adds user confusion. It might be a worthwhile tradeoff if doing so is necessary to save screen space, but if the keypad is actually accounting for such a significant portion of your screen real estate, I'd love to see your monitor.

[Etherlord87]

As I hinted in my previous comment, power users of Windows, don't use apps bundled with Windows! :D

You can download a calculator that is designed to your preferences. I actually wrote a calculator in Autohotkey that was a keylogger constantly checking if last typed characters can be interpreted as a mathematical expression - if so, the expression was evaluated and displayed as a tooltip, and pressing a shortcut could be pressed to paste an equal sign and that evaluated value. Never finished it though, demotivated by how hard it was to port to other OSes.

[user3939382]

Checkout Soulver on macOS. It’s awesome! It’s like an old paper tape calculator on steroids. It supports variables and comments, for example. Also, no virtual keypad :)

[upbeat_general]

+1

The real draw is the unit support (dates, times, currency, etc etc) but makes it feel natural.

[ksec]

Still waiting for Soulver update on iOS .

[xupybd]

We have calculators open on our machine label computers. Those computers don't have a keyboard only a touch screen. Without the keypad these computers could not use the windows calculator. That said this is an unusual use case.

[sidpatil]

If someone was trying to enter text into a running application on that machine, wouldn't an on-screen keyboard pop up? (Unless that's been disabled, of course.)

[xupybd]

No it doesn't pop up automatically. It can be brought up but you have to find it.

Anything other than day to day use is done via remote connection.

[fendy3002]

Well until you need scientific calculator computation, such as log, sin / cos, rad / deg, root.

[charcircuit]

Your keyboard has letters on it. You can type all of those out.

[CydeWeys]

The one disadvantage of that is you cannot easily see all available functions at once. It loses discoverability. Autocomplete on the input prompt will help rectify that somewhat, but only somewhat.

[qsort]

The discoverability argument doesn't make a lot of sense for a calculator app.

One might want to list the content of a directory without knowing that the magic word is "ls", but there is a 0% chance that someone wants to compute the cosine of a number but can't figure out to type "cos".

[jart]

But is it cos x, cos(x), cos[x], math.cos(x), or \cos x? Calculators are usually simple enough that all the ops can be buttons. So why not do it? There's always alternatives like Python, Mathematica, Maxima, Fricas, etc. which don't really bother with the buttons, because if they did, it'd look like a Chinese typewriter.

[fendy3002]

Additionally it also hinders those who do not natively speak English. Sqrt or square root and pow aren't terms that commonly used in calculator for other languages, at least my country.

And I guess sqrt shortform isn't that common used either.

Able to see symbols can clear those ambiguity

[Induane]

I don't mind the buttons for special functions, but for numbers and operators? Yeesh that's redundant. I can type 0 through 9, + and - without needing discoverability for sure. At minimum I assume the calculator does arithmetic. Buttons for special features tell me it does other things too.

[Aachen]

I think they were talking about the number keys, and perhaps plus and equals (but that might need shift depending on the keyboard and be less convenient), not cosine and family.

[mackrevinack]

> The only calculators I know that makes keypad optional/hideable are SpeedCrunch and Qalculate!, and now this.

or theres "invisible" calculators like this[1] that do away with GUI altogether. microsoft's onenote has something similar built in as well

1: https://github.com/davebrny/in-line-calculator

[antholeole]

Desmos.com/scientific is my go to. Best calculator ever - understands some LaTeX but also has the buttons for scenarios where I don’t know the LaTeX

[avmich]

If you have a J interpreter installed, I'd like to see what preferred calculators can offer.

[krallja]

What about Calca or Soulver? They don’t have keypads at all. They’re more like REPLs for calculation languages.

[bufferoverflow]

Touchscreens

[topspin]

SpeQ Mathematics has been my go-to for many years. The times have left it behind, but it's still too handy to forego. It's a simple, vanishingly small (132KB) REPL.