It all started with Super Bowl LIX. “What number is that?” Sure, that answer could be solved with a Google search, or even worse, burning petrol to fuel some LLM query. Being an Emacs user, I was certain someone had already solved the problem of translation to Roman numbers. Indeed this was the case but the answer was in two separate packages, both included in Emacs:

• Roman to Hindu-Arabic number translation was covered by the command rst-roman-to-arabic in the reStructuredText (rst) package.
• Hindu-Arabic to Roman number translation was covered by the command org-export-number-to-roman in the Org export (ox) package.

“Hunh” I thought, seems like I’d never recall that these two packages have the commands that would do the job for me. I’d have a much better chance of using them if they were in a single package whose name I could remember.

So begat numeri, a new package that wraps both of the above commands, now available on MELPA.

There are two commands of note:

• numeri-arabic-to-roman

  This command will accept either an Arabic integer number selected as a region or input via mini-buffer prompt and convert it to its Roman equivalent. The result is copied into the kill-ring.

• numeri-roman-to-arabic

  This command will accept either a Roman integer number selected as a region or input via mini-buffer prompt and convert it to its Arabic equivalent. The result is copied into the kill-ring.

Closing Thoughts

I have no expectations on how useful folks will find numeri. Regardless, there is delight in knowing that for even the most esoteric of problems, there’s a non-zero chance that someone has already solved it in Emacs.

emacs