Napkin

A natural-language calculator. Write on the left in whatever words you would have used on paper, and read the results down the right.

rent = 1200                     1,200
rent for the year = rent * 12   14,400
20% of 150                      30
12 km in miles                  7.456 miles

It is the back of an envelope that adds up. Name a thing, use the name further down, change the number at the top and watch the rest follow. Units and currencies are part of the language rather than a mode you switch into, so 12 km in miles is a sentence and not a conversion dialog.

What it is not

It is not a spreadsheet. There are no cells to address, no formula bar, and nothing to drag. A spreadsheet is the right tool the moment a calculation has rows; Napkin is for everything before that, which is most of it.

It is not online, either, in the sense that matters. The web version runs offline once loaded, keeps what you write on your own machine, and asks for nothing.

Where it runs

A terminal app, a GTK app for the desktop, and a browser version that works with the network off. All three share one engine, so the same sheet gives the same answers wherever you open it. They print the same page too: the layout is shared code rather than three approximations of a document.

Live, at napkin.plus