Mathpad

Mathpad is a small extension for Visual Studio Code that turns a Markdown editor into an interactive scratchpad calculator.

I created this because I couldn’t find a good notebook calculator that I liked that

• is free and open source,
• supports all the platforms I care about,
• works completely offline,
• supports variables and functions,
• allows you to edit anywhere (as opposed to REPL style),
• and works in and saves as plain text.

I already have Visual Studio Code installed on all my computers and use it for lots of text editing purposes, so I decided to make it also my calculator using this extension.

Features

• Math expressions on their own line inside a Markdown editor are evaluated automatically and their results are displayed in grey at the end of the line.
• Variables can be defined on their own line like x = 42 and referenced on any line below it.
• Functions can be defined on their own line like f(x) = 42 / x and referenced on any line below it.
• Changing a variable or function definition will automatically re-evaluate everywhere it is used in the rest of the document.

Much more is available as math expressions, which are powered by Math.js. Check out the Math.js documentation for even more examples of what sorts of expressions can be evaluated.

Future ideas

There’s a lot more neat ideas that could be implemented, including:

• Defining our own language/editor type with dedicated math syntax highlighting.
• Evaluating expressions embedded in normal text.
• Replacing an expression with its result.

License

This project’s source code and documentation is licensed under the MIT license. See the LICENSE file for details.