programmer-calculator

Programmer calculator

The programmer calculator is a simple terminal tool designed to give maximum efficiency and flexibility to the programmer working with:

• binary, hexadecimal and decimal representations at the same time
• bitwise operations
• various operand sizes (16bits, 32bits, 8bits, etc)

and who likes:

• a clear, simple and customizable interface
• open source software
• terminal/cli tools

The above picture depicts pcalc without colors, and below is an example of pcalc with colors enabled (--colors) (which change depending on the terminal profile colors)

Making of

The idea was born while developing a Nintendo Gameboy Emulator. Romes - the pitcher - found that the tools given online were clunky and did not allow for “nice multitasking”

With the constant need to visualize and manipulate bits, it became evident that a better solution had to come to life

Installation

Homebrew

Install from the homebrew official packages

brew install pcalc

Arch Based Distros

Install from AUR

yay -S programmer-calculator

Building from Source (alternative)

Prerequisites:

To build from source you need gcc, ncurses, and the source files. If you don’t have ncurses, please install it (i.e. with your system’s package manager) first. (To install ncurses in Debian based distros run sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev libncursesw5-dev)

Building:

First, clone the repository and change directory to it

git clone https://github.com/alt-romes/programmer-calculator ; cd programmer-calculator

Then, compile the code into an executable file and install it (installs in /usr/local/bin)

sudo make install

Conversely, if you ever want to uninstall, you can run:

sudo make uninstall

Updating

Either re-build from source, or, using brew do

brew update

followed by

brew upgrade pcalc

Running

Just run the programmer calculator program

pcalc

Features

Usage

There are various ways to insert values/operators, see the example 2 + 2 below:

• 2, followed by +, followed by 2
• 2, followed by +2
• 2+, followed by 2
• 2+2 (or i.e. 2 + 2)

Inline Math

Operator precedence and parenthesis for grouping is used.

2+2*3 evaluates to 8 and (2+2)*3 evaluates to 12

Hex + Binary + Decimal

All three number representations are available at the same time, you can insert 0xff + 0b101101 - 5 directly onto the calculator

Operand Size

By default, 64 bits are used for arithmetic, however, when working with bits, quite often we want to work with less. With this calculator you can change the amount of bits used. the number displayed will be unsigned

To use 16 bits instead, type 16bit (bits will also work)

To use 8 bits, type 8bit

To use 0 < n <= 64 bits, type nbit

Customizing Interface

While running the calculator, you can type what you see for it to appear/disappear:

history to toggle the history decimal to toggle the decimal representation binary to toggle the binary representation hex to toggle the hexadecimal representation operation to toggle the operation display

Additionally, the interface colors can be toggled on and off.

To set a default interface, define an alias for the program with the desired hidden options

alias pcalc='pcalc -ibxdosn'

i: history, b: binary, x: hex, d: decimal, o: operation, s: symbols, n: no colors

You can also use the long options to hide parts: --history, --decimal, etc.

Operations

ADD  +    SUB  -    MUL  *    DIV  /
MOD  %    AND  &    OR   |    NOR  $
XOR  ^    NOT  ~    SL   <    SR   >
RL   :    RR   ;    2's  _    SE   @

• ADD: a + b arithmetic addition
• SUB: a - b arithmetic subtraction
• MUL: a * b arithmetic multiplication
• DIV: a / b arithmetic integer division
• MOD: a % b modulus from the division
• AND: a & b bit-wise AND operation
• OR : a | b bit-wise OR operation
• NOR: a $ b bit-wise NOR operation : opposite of OR
• XOR: a ^ b bit-wise XOR operation : exclusive OR
• NOT: ~a bit-wise NOT operation : change all bits of a, 0’s into 1’s and 1’s into 0’s
• SL : a < b bit-wise SHIFT-LEFT operation : shift a left b number of times
• SR : a > b bit-wise SHIFT-RIGHT operation : shift a right b number of times
• RL : a : b bit-wise ROTATE-LEFT operation : rotate a left b number of times
• RR : a ; b bit-wise ROTATE-RIGHT operation : rotate a right b number of times
• 2’s: _a 2’s complement operation : 2’s complement of a (usually is the symmetric of a)
• SE : @a swap endianness : swap the byte order of a (uses the number of bits set by bit to determine the amount of bits swapped)

Contributing

Please reference Contributing

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example usage in iterm panel

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