I only use python as a calculator. However a friend made me remark that it’s faster to hit the “Calc” key from your keyboard and use the default gnome-calculator. Although I don’t quite agree since I always have a terminal opened, I still decided to make some good use of this otherwise superfluous “Calc” key.

The best calculator:

I mapped a new shortcut to it. That’s my calculator now:

gnome-terminal --hide-menubar --geometry=60x20 -t Python -x python -Q new -i -c "from numpy import *"

A quick explanation:

It launches a new terminal (gnome-terminal) executing the command python -Q new -i -c "from numpy import *".

The gnome-terminal part:

--hide-menubar disables the menu bar of the terminal (file, edit and so on)
--geometry=60x20: terminal size of 60 columns x 20 lines
-t Python: title of the windows is “Python”
-x: everything after this is the command executed.

The python part:

-Q new allow int/int divisions to return float values (no longer required to write points after numbers to make sure they are floats).
-c ... execute the specified command.
-i open the interactive shell after having executed the command.

Like this, I already have all numpy loaded, and I can type pi, e, log and all those functions quite suited for a calculator.

All of this was just because I like to be the one that’s right.

The best calculator (bis):

I improved the previous solution by setting a specific gnome-terminal profile for this task. It’s cooler because I can set a different font (Inconsolata), a more transparent background, and write the geometry, the window title and the python command directly in the profile settings. This new profile is named “Calculaterm”, so I updated my keyboard shortcut to simply this:

gnome-terminal --hide-menubar --window-with-profile=Calculaterm