# Make Unitful simplify expressions like 1μm/1m to a unitless value by default

**URL:** https://discourse.julialang.org/t/make-unitful-simplify-expressions-like-1-m-1m-to-a-unitless-value-by-default/71866
**Category:** General Usage
**Tags:** unitful
**Created:** [November 21, 2021, 6:47pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/make-unitful-simplify-expressions-like-1-m-1m-to-a-unitless-value-by-default/71866 "2021-11-21T18:47:31Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 11

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### Author: ![Deduction42](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/deduction42/32/9206_2.png) [@Deduction42](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/Deduction42)
#### Post date: [May 9, 2026, 1:10pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/make-unitful-simplify-expressions-like-1-m-1m-to-a-unitless-value-by-default/71866/11 "2026-05-09T13:10:23Z")

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I saw this thread after I posed my new version announcement for [FlexUnits.jl](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/ann-flexunits-jl-0-5-unit-simplification-and-log-units/137045) which includes this feature. It simplifies units better than `upreferred` which can give you rather opaque results with a lot of electrical units. You can even use `display_simplified_units(true)` to set it to simplify units by default when displaying.

FlexUnits.jl follows much of Unitful’s convention so it shouldn’t be too difficult for most people to pick up. It matches Unitful for speed in statically inferrable cases, but absolutely dominates Unitful for cases where units can’t be inferred (this bothered me a lot because I often build configurable systems where I have to parse units as string, which completely wrecks performance, FlexUnits solves that problem with Unitful as well as many others).

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