It's not terribly exciting but I find myself using this a lot:
#!/bin/sh
echo "$*" | sed -e "s/x/*/g" | bc -l
Just a little shorthand for bc that allows me to write "x" instead of "*" to avoid shell expansion nonsense. I put it in ~/.local/bin/= so I can e.g. just write = 17+4x5. Combined with a Quake-style terminal this is much faster than launching a calculator app. It's a script instead of an alias so it works regardless of the shell I'm currently using.
The call to bc -l could be replaced with one to qalc -t if you know qalc to be present on the system .