Project: summarum

2024-11-17

I created a small Tauri app that works like a Math notepad!

I call it summarum and I just released version 0.1 on my GitHub.

Here is what it looks like:

The idea for this project came when my girlfriend made some calculations and needed some help, and we then saw that she had some unit wrong. When I helped her, I used Qalculate!. Qalculate is quite great, and using that we found the error. Unfortunately, Qalculate doesn't look so nice. While using it, I remembered the app Numi which is a bit similar but looks really nice.

I then thought I could create something similar and open-source very quickly using Tauri and mathjs.

As is so often the case, I was wrong. I did not anticipate how hard it is to get textareas (or contenteditable divs) to work while simultaneously putting results in them. Initially, I wanted to do just that. When I saw that it's quite a feat, I switched to using some online text editor library, and chose the great CodeMirror for that.

In the end, I didn't even put the results right in the text, but instead on a right-hand column. I still kept using CodeMirror, as it also gives me many other things like syntax highlighting, and potentially further things in the future.

Writing this small app was a nice learning experience, especially on the web front. And I'm quite happy to have CodeMirror in my toolbelt - it seems like something that is good to know about and be able to use.

Right now summarum can do everything that mathjs can do. I haven't decided whether I want to keep on writing on it, I'll see. Primarily, this was just for learning and trying things out.

I do have some ideas for continuing it though. For example, I'd really like the math notes to be persisted when closing and opening the app. I'll see how much time I find to continue this.