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Life & fun · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Shellmath: Floating-point arithmetic directly in bash

Yes, Virginia, you can do floating-point arithmetic in Bash! - clarity20/shellmath

Shellmath is a bash tool that enables floating-point arithmetic calculations directly within shell scripts. It allows developers and system administrators who work with bash to perform decimal math operations that the… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier. Shellmath: Floating-point arithmetic directly in bash launched in 2021; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1

    I launched NumPad v1 on here a few years ago, and back then it wasn't much more than a thin CodeMirror wrapper around the calculator engine I'd written. Now I've rewritten it as a PWA that supports multiple documents, persists them to IndexedDB, and has a syncing service for paying customers. Syncing is handled by Automerge[1] under the hood, which should make it relatively easy to get document sharing working too. [1] https://automerge.org/

    2022 · numpad.io · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    An attempt at saner Bash defaults. Contribute to mrzool/bash-sensible development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2016 · github.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    I've built a tool called sol (like "soul") that helps you inspect and format complex shell one-liners. Features: - Choose which transformations you want (break on pipe, args, redirect, whatever) - "Peeks" into stringified commands (think xargs, parallel) and formats those, too - Auto-breaks at a given width (e.g., 80 characters) - Shows you non-standard aliases, functions, files, etc. that you might not have in your shell environment - Breaks up long jq lines with jqfmt because—let's be honest—they're getting out of hand As a security researcher and tool developer, I often encounter (or…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4
    BashBuddy▲159

    Write bash commands with natural language, fully local.

    2025 · bashbuddy.run · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Terminal based bit manipulator in ncurses. Contribute to mellowcandle/bitwise development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2019 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Minimal distributed configuration management in bash - frameable/aviary.sh

    2020 · github.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7IM

    I've been studying interval arithmetic for the past few weeks and it's a really interesting field because while there is a ton of super interesting research published over the past decades, it has never really gotten the recognition that it deserves, IMO. One reason for this is that standard interval arithmetic has really poor handling of division by intervals containing zero. If you compute 1 / [-1, 2] in regular interval arithmetic, you get either [-∞, +∞], or you have to say that the operation is undefined. Both solutions are virtually useless. The real answer of course is [-∞, -1] U…

    Apr 2026 · victorpoughon.github.io · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    This R statistical nmath module re-created in typescript/javascript and handwritten webassembly. - R-js/libRmath.js

    2018 · github.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    A simple command-line calculator written in Go. Contribute to alfredxing/calc development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2015 · github.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10
    KnightOS▲136

    An open-source OS for calculators

    2016 · its alternatives →

  11. 11CA

    Hi everyone, here's a web app I made that generates code for efficiently approximating mathematical functions. This is useful when performance matters more than perfect accuracy, for example in embedded systems. The app uses Chebyshev expansions, which despite their theoretical depth result in suprisingly compact and readable code in practice. This code is generated for you and using it does not require any knowledge of the underlying theory. Source code and more info: https://github.com/stuffmatic/chebyshev-calculator

    2024 · stuffmatic.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    Calculate how long will you take to get SixPAC ab'ed

    2021 · its alternatives →

  13. 13AD

    A new calculator software cannot really bring attention (https://chachatelier.fr/chalk/) However, I wrote a full article explaining why I had to build something "new" that does not behave like usual desktop calculator softwares : TL;DR All "small" calculator softwares I know share the same design flaws. And the GUI is not the only stumbling block in their poor efficiency. Handling correctly numerical approximations - expected or not - is crucial to trust the results. It is usually not done in lightweight tools. It should. So I prove that if I could do it, OS manufacturers…

    2022 · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Save time and effort calculating math problems

    2023 · marketplace.visualstudio.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Kalker is a calculator that supports user-defined variables, functions, ambiguous syntax, differentiation and integration. It runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and in web browsers (with WebAssembly).

    2021 · kalk.strct.net · its alternatives →

  16. 16AA

    Hey everyone! I'm Rob and I want to share what I've built - a solid ledger behind simple API: https://decimals.app The ledger is a key piece of any financial system and is easy to get the design wrong, resulting in troubles for making sure money movements are adding up. I took a lot of inspiration from good designs from Square, Uber, and others for the scalability and security aspects. And on the usability side, I applied many concepts from the Ledger CLI, making it very easy to use. I'm really happy I get to show this to you all, thank you for reading about it! Please let me know…

    2020 · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    The core question: how did HP's scientific calculators actually work at the gate level? That rabbit hole led to building one from scratch. The architectural decision everything else follows from: a decimal calculator should store numbers as BCD — one decimal digit per 4-bit nibble. A standard byte-oriented CPU (Z80, 6502) fights that layout constantly. So I designed a small custom CPU in Verilog where 4 bits is the natural data width and memory is nibble addressable. What the project covers: - Custom CPU: Harvard architecture, 12-bit ISA, 8-state execution FSM, hardware stack guard with a…

    May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18AC
  19. 19CS

    The pattern of downloading and executing installation scripts without verifying them has bothered me for a while. I started messing around with a way to verify the checksum of scripts before I execute them. I've found it a really useful tool for installing things like Rust or Deno. It's written entirely as a shell script, and it's easy to read and understand what's happening. I hope it may be useful to someone else!

    2022 · checksum.sh · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    I originally was just messing with pi-autoresearch. Gave it a sample task to build the most portable coding agent. First cut was 6 KB of shell. Great for one-shots, unusable interactively. I was shocked it actually worked. Started building up -- adding features — but with a self-imposed rule: no new dependencies, and sub 500 LOC. This thing had to be truly portable. Just sh, curl, awk. System primitives only. Which means I did some genuinely disgusting things in awk, including JSON parsing and the OpenAI Responses tool loop with reasoning items carried across turns. It's now ~400 lines. In…

    Apr 2026 · pu.dev · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    A bash-like shell that performs basic functions of a shell. Made as a project for my course of System Software. - skywalker212/tiny-shell

    2018 · github.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Simple Python Calculation Engine. Contribute to bsdz/calcengine development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2021 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Since there is so much interest on HN in floats lately and their software implementations, I wanted to show mine. It has no use and is just for teaching me floats and C++. Give me your thoughts.

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24
    PiPad▲72

    Perform calculations as you would in your notepad

    2022 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →

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