hledger VS visidata

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 and this [bash script](https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/blob/a3c300b/bake) have been replaced by this roughly equivalent [Justfile](https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/blob/137d825/Justfil...)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.

https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/issues/2047 . Thanks!

For help getting started or more info, see https://hledger.org and join our Matrix/IRC chat or mail list: https://hledger.org/support . Newcomers, experts, contributors, sponsors, feedback are welcome! For more about plain text accounting, see https://plaintextaccounting.org .

[4] "Is it possible to "flatten" structured data (like JSON?)": https://github.com/saulpw/visidata/discussions/1605

Visidata - https://visidata.org

You can try Visidata

VisiData is an awesome terminal spreadsheet tool. edbrowse for internet browsing.

Have you ever tried out visidata? It's not vim, but it's a terminal app with vim-like keybindings for visualizing tabular data (and it can convert from other types like json). Not quite a neovim buffer, but you could always open visidata in a new terminal buffer.

If you are a command-line user, try visidata[0]

[0] https://github.com/saulpw/visidata

The datasets will be available as SQLite, JSONL, and CSV. This will be great for sharpening your SQL/Python/VisiData skills.

Help Sarah find the family holiday tapestry before her father notices it's missing! Sharpen your SQL/Python/VisiData skills with Hanukkah of Data.