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Emacs' calc can also be surprisingly powerful. Not quite at the level of Maxima, but still perfectly capable of basic symbolic algebra and calculus, arbitrary precision arithmetic, linear algebra, and other good things.

I use it quite heavily since it's right there in my editor. It's kind of like a good-enough phone camera that's always close at hand vs. a dedicated camera that's better but takes more effort to have ready.



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That's neat. I had no idea calc could do calculus!

It can indeed! Adapting the first example from the article, in Emacs type:

    M-x quick-calc RET
    integ(exp(-x^2),x) RET
You'll see that it immediately responds back with:

    erf(x) sqrt(pi) / 2

I always facepalm when I do math outside of Emacs. Calc was never really advertised, it's not a toy.

Also I've heard it might be scraped from vanilla emacs and made into an extesion, but I may be confused.


The Emacs Wiki does describe it as the "poor man's Mathematica". Org-tables with Calc functions are also quite nice.

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