Recently when I installed Arch Linux on my machine, I was on the lookout for a lightweight calculator to be used on my LXDE desktop. My search led me to SpeedCrunch.

SpeedCrunch is a light weight, fast, precision scientific calculator released under GPL. The first time I ran this calculator on my machine, I found its interface rather queer; considering I was used to the traditional view of a calculator. SpeedCrunch has a large text area (Output) which displays the result of the calculation and a small text field (Input) right below it in which the user can type commands. Talking of commands, there are a whole lot of stock commands available.

Uses of SpeedCrunch calculator

You can use SpeedCrunch to calculate complex quadratic equations, find the surface area of 3D and 2D objects, use inbuilt commands by typing them in the input instead of using the mouse and much more.

There are around 45 constants built into SpeedCrunch which can be used in your calculations readily with the click of a mouse. Some examples of these constants are Avogadro’s number, Atomic mass unit, Coulomb’s constant, Earth mass, Light year, Elementary charge and so on. You can view the full list of constants by using the keyboard shortcut [Ctrl+2]. To use the value of the mathematical constant Pi, just use ‘pi’.

SpeedCrunch User Interface Explained

Another very powerful feature of SpeedCrunch is its plethora of inbuilt functions such as sine, cos, tan, average and so on. In fact, the functions span the gamut of trigonometry, logic (and, nand,or, xor, …) and arithemetic (average, sum, sqrt,…). You can access these functions using the shortcut key [Ctrl+3].

If you ever want to reuse a function, then there is the History tab which contain a record of all the calculations you have done so far. But the one feature which I found really time saving was, SpeedCrunch allows you to use your own variables and set values for them. You can save a lot of time by assigning values to variables and then reusing them in your calculations.

For example, I can type in the input field …

x=2
y=5
x+y

… and get answer as 7 in the output. You can assign values to as many variables as you want like this. Now if I want to find the average value of x and y then it is as easy as ….

average(x;y)

The semicolon is used to seperate parameters in functions.

Another very interesting feature is it’s use of syntax color. When you type known functions in the input, SpeedCrunch displays them in vivid colors. This makes it much easier to understand and keep track of what you type. The other distinct features of SpeedCrunch are multi-language support, saving sessions for later retreval and importing and exporting the output.

Apart from Linux, SpeedCrunch can be installed in Mac OSX and Windows which makes it truly multi platform. And it is developed using Qt4, the same library used in developing KDE 4. All in all, SpeedCrunch lives up to its claim of being a fast, precise scientific calculator.