hledger VS GnuCash

A simple TUI to view various financial reports of your personal finances. Uses hledger[1] under the hood for the accounting stuff.

[1]: https://hledger.org

For historical interest (though to compare you really need to work with them over a period of time), here's a thousand line [Makefile](https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/blob/2d35b1051/Makef...) that was converted to a [Justfile](https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/blob/43c93eb37/Justf...). And here's the kind of template I used for multicommand shell scripts when trying those ([ft](https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/blob/43c93eb37/bin/f...), [tt](https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/blob/43c93eb37/bin/t...)).

I'm surprised that there is no mentions of a great hacker-friendly plain-text accounting software called `ledger` https://ledger-cli.org/ in this thread. It has amazing documentation when it comes to understanding basic principles of double-entry bookkeeping and goes through many typical situations and usecases. There are also several forks, most popular and advanced is `hledger` https://hledger.org/ (h is for Haskell), which provides some neat features out of the box, such as a simple web interface. All of them are very primitive compared to "professional" accounting software, but in return it offers great opportunities for hacking around while ensuring validity of your books.

I've been using hledger[1] - similar tool but has more features like balance sheet, income statement generation with a plain text file for the last 3 years and it's been working out great. Before that I used iBank (rebranded as Banktivity) and don't miss it at all.

[1] - https://hledger.org

I can offer this (warning, crufty real-world scripts ahead!): these [make](https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/blob/137d825/Makefil...) [files](https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/blob/137d825/Makefil...) and this [bash script](https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/blob/a3c300b/bake) have been replaced by this roughly equivalent [Justfile](https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/blob/137d825/Justfil...) (some old things were commented out, some new things were added).

I'm only a few weeks in, and just has its own learning curve, but I'm very pleased overall. Cognitive load is down, usability is up, robustness is up.

GitHub: GnuCash GitHub Repository

Check out https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash

https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash/pull/1794

Note the full API may be accessible via a cli interface.

The above work will be merged hopefully soon.

For the first repository, gnucash, it appears to be a C++ application. The common convention for a C++ app is to have the "main()" function inside a source file with the same name as the library, e.g. "gnucash.cpp". And sure enough, here it is. If I didn't think to guess that it was in that file, I could always just download the repository and do a CTRL-F for "main(". That would lead me to it immediately.

I also use GnuCash as accounting package (since 2008) for my business and it's great. Never had any issue with it.