As an engineer, I find the often underrated calculator application to be an invaluable tool. From double-checking simple calculations, to working with large numbers in different bases, it tends to be the constant companion of my pen and paper. Years ago, xcalc was my goto calculator program. Released in 1987 and meant to emulate the TI-30, it was a great scientific calculator for the time.

At some point, I began using gcalc, a GTK+ clone of xcalc. Then, I moved up to galculator. And, from there, on to gcalctool. Recently, I began to notice that the gcalctool window takes up nearly 1/3 of my display (width-wise) in Programming mode (825x519), and that the layout of the digits is a bit bothersome. I suppose I had become too used to the typical 3x3+1 telephone keypad-style layout of most calculators/numpads.

Why the hell does a calculator need to occupy that much space on my screen? Even if I decrease the font size, I'm fairly certain that the window would still be insanely large. I've always believed that productivity tools should be helpful and stay out of the way. Thus, I decided the time has come for xcalc to get some new features, such as:

• Bitwise ops (e.g. and, xor, shl, shr)
• Modulus
• Base conversion (Decimal, Hexadecimal, Octal)

It only took a couple of hours to add these features in, and in doing so made xcalc more useful for me than either galculator or gcalctool. After adding three rows of buttons to the UI, xcalc takes up a whopping 240x424 pixels. This means I can easily fit three xcalc windows side-by-side in the same space required for one gcalctool window. I also added shortcut keys for the new operators. Now I'm free to use more of my screen real estate for more important things, and you have to admit that even after nearly 27 years, xcalc still looks pretty bad-ass.

I've sent a little patch upstream (currently pending acceptance), and as always the source code for my modifications can be found on Github.