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#plaintextaccounting

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Replied in thread

@winterschon For other favorites:

Calendar: I love remind(1), a CLI calendar that is more powerful than any other calendar I've ever used. It's a little rough sharing events externally or importing external events (I see you CalDAV note), but for our household, it's great, and I wrote up a detailed blog post² on how I use it (it's a little out of date now, but still works).

Finances: I track mine in ledger(1), largely compatible with hledger(1). There's also BeanCount with its web UI, Fava, but I'm less familiar with that. I'm wary of handing all our household financial data over to some 3rd party, but I do want insights into our spending, saving, etc, so #plaintextaccounting is handy for that

Todos: some folks prefer TaskWarrior³ which is the 900lb gorillia in the CLI todo-tracking game, but I prefer simple todo.txt-style⁴ todo lists, and I symlink my todo.txt file to my ~/.plan so I can use finger(1) to get my todo list remotely.

They all have the advantage of storing all their data in #plaintext, meaning I can track it in git and sync it around between machines.

That said, I know CLI apps aren't everybody's cup of tea, but they fit my brain and I like keeping everything local. And they're all light on resources, so even the wimpiest RPi runs them fine.

¹ dianne.skoll.ca/projects/remin
² blog.thechases.com/posts/remin
³ taskwarrior.org/
github.com/todotxt/todo.txt-cl

dianne.skoll.caDianne Skoll's Web Site - Remind - Software Projects

For those of you who are into #PlainTextAccounting: Which software are you using and why?

I'd like to finally start personal accounting again. I stopped when #YNAB became SaaS. YNAB's "envelope budgeting" worked really well for me, and I'd like to get back to a similar workflow. (Or, if you think you know something superior, let me know!)

I'm very open to comments and suggestions here, but it has to be open source software.

#plainTextAccounting just got a whole lot more fun! I don't know about hledger, but did you know that Beancount allows symbols/emojis in file names?

Be aware that symbols must not be immediately preceded by a colon or they will flag as an error.

Continued thread

As much as I love plain text accounting, there are subtle things about it that make me want to write a program. That's a lot of how I do my book keeping for my publishing company and apparently how I'm handling Partner's babysitting.

The only difference is that this uses Deno instead of Node and I'm trying out hledger verses beancount. Mostly because I wanted to try out puffin which I don't exactly like. But, hledger is more popular than beancount so I might as well let them war in my head for a while before I decide on one or the other.

Replied in thread

@astrophoenix @ellane
I use a depth limit in my default queries.
So if under assets:bank:wf:checking I have assets:bank:wf:checking:tax:2024:us and assets:bank:wf:checking:tax:2025:us, I normally limit balance reports to depth 4 to hide those, eg by adding

[balance] -4

to ~/.hledger.conf. I also hide lot subaccounts this way. My chart of accounts is arranged so that this simple depth limit works for all, but if not I could set per-account depth limits.

Simple really is better, more times than not.

Yesterday I figured out how to track savings goals in Beancount (Fava) by creating a parallel BGT currency. It involves more data entry, but it does the calculation between what's already saved and my goal.

Nice, but unnecessary.

Today I scrapped all that (yay for backups!) and simply added the savings goal to the name of each account. Thanks for the tip on the forum, @simonmic

After 7 months of #plainTextAccounting, insights are starting to flow. Honestly I have no idea how I'd have tracked all this without a) paying a ridiculous amount of $ every month, b) locking myself into an app that doesn't do what I need it to, and c) makes it hard to move somewhere else!

Admittedly the hardest thing about PTA wasn't learning how to use the command line. It was learning the principles of accounting, and how to apply them to my situation.

I hacked together a review of my projects' commits from last year.

paste.sr.ht/~goorzhel/07f7aecf

Salient trends:
- In January–Feburary, I created a homelab NixOS flake from scratch, after having used divnix/digga long past its deprecation.
- In April, I first published my Beancount tools, `budget` and `categorize` (#PlainTextAccounting). Hidden from view is the two months I spent developing them inside `~/money/bin`.
- In May, I read about the Chakraborty–Vinodchandran–Meel algorithm and implemented it in Python. I naively used a dictionary and couldn't find a suitable treap library, so it's brutally slow.
- I spent the holiday break refactoring Turboprop.

Replied to Ellane

@ellane @twelvety
Tip: if scrolling one character at a time is too slow, you can configure it to move faster by setting --shift=COLS in the LESS or HLEDGER_LESS environment variable. Here's what I seem to be using:

$ echo $LESS
EFRSWX --use-color --shift=2 --mouse --wheel-lines=4

And `less` has many more options, be warned it's a bit of a maze and custom LESS settings will affect many terminal programs. HLEDGER_LESS affects only the hledger tools.

Replied in thread

@janvlug @nixCraft

And if the CLI is more your thing, you can check out #plaintextaccounting with ledger/hledger/beancount for your accounting needs ☺ Brings all the benefits of plain-text files (track them in git and sync them, use any $EDITOR you want to manipulate them, use standard Unix tools like grep/sed/awk and shell-functions to manipulate them, they compress well, etc)

plaintextaccounting.org/

plaintextaccounting.orgPlain Text Accounting (PTA) - plaintextaccounting.org

I am looking for a way to get dollar amounts to align to the right in VS Code. The hledger extension doesn't do this, and I haven't found one that does.

I like having my plain text accounting entries line up, but changing account names (which I'm doing a lot as I work out what the chart of accounts should look like) really messes things up.