Brain Assistant

Brain Assistant is a CLI tool intended for computing mathematical expressions and being an encyclopedia for mathematical concepts.

Installation

Install using cargo:

cargo install brain-assistant

Usage

Invoke the brain command without any arguments to start the graphical user interface, which contains a REPL pane and an information pane. You can write any number of expressions and get the reduced expression as well as extra info regarding the calculation. Exit the program by pressing Ctrl-C or Esc:

You can also use it in single line mode by passing an expression as an argument to the brain command, in which case it will parse and reduce the input as an expression:

❯ brain 1+2+3
6
❯ brain 1*2*3
6
❯ brain (1+2)*3
9

Sometimes an expression can be misinterpreted as a flag argument, in which case you will need to use -- to separate flags from input:

❯ brain -1+1
error: unexpected argument '-1' found

  tip: to pass '-1' as a value, use '-- -1'

Usage: brain [expression]...

For more information, try '--help'.
❯ brain -- -1+1
0

Tips and Tricks

If you are using zsh, parenthesises and multiplication might collide with the glob pattern match settings. To prevent this, you can either quote the input (e.g. brain "(1+2)*3"), or prefix the command with noglob (e.g noglob brain (1+2)*3). Even better, you can create an alias that always disables glob pattern matching for brain and save it in your zsh profile:

echo "alias brain='noglob brain'" >> ~/.zshrc