plaintextaccounting VS emanote

I use ledger: https://ledger-cli.org/

I believe this same plain text format is used by other tools, which you can find info about here: https://plaintextaccounting.org/ (In particular a lot of people seem to use hledger and beancount)

The ledger is written using a text editor. The purpose of the software is to add everything up, calculate the balances and make sure everything balances. I keep all of my 12 years of accounting in one file and haven't noticed any slowdown. But a real business would surely have many more accounts and may want to split files by financial year or something.

I use helper scripts to convert the data from my bank CSV downloads into ledger format. It uses machine learning to associate payees to accounts (e.g. "Tesco" gets filed to the account "Expenses:Groceries"). I haven't maintained the ML part although it works for me most of the time. In case it's useful, the code is here: https://github.com/georgek/accounts/

I invite you to hang out in the https://plaintextaccounting.org/#news-discussion -> chats, we like to discuss tactics.

My attempt at solving the same problem https://paisa.fyi. It builds on top of https://plaintextaccounting.org/ principles and is available as a CLI/Desktop App.

ledger, hledger, beancount: https://plaintextaccounting.org/

Gnucash

Firefly III

The plain text accounting options are by far the best if you're willing to give up automatic pretty navigation and graphing.

I use Beancount; learned at https://plaintextaccounting.org/.

I use ledger (https://plaintextaccounting.org/) to manage my transactions in plain text and then generate reports. I copy/paste the transactions from pdfs received monthly in an Emacs Org file and then convert them to ledger format using ob-lc (https://github.com/jayrajput/ob-ledger-convert). There is a steep learning curve, but the results are awesome.

I had tried few apps in the past (Walnut, Mint etc), but I was reluctant to share my bank credentials, sms access etc. At some point, I came across plain text accounting concept and never looked back. There is a big learning curve in the beginning, but in the long run, I think it is essential to understand the basics of accounting. Since it's just a command line tool, it's hard to visualize the data. So I built a UI layer on top of the ledger command line tool called paisa.

Something I have been considering myself is writing a personal budgeting tool in the spirit of https://plaintextaccounting.org/ in Haskell.

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 .

Im personally using Emanote which does exactly what you describe. It supports LaTeX and lots of other features via Pandoc. Its also very nice to use in that it supports hot-reloading, instead of requiring manual refreshing. The only downside for some might be that its installed via the Nix ecosystem which is (great but) a bit of a rabbit hole you might not want to deal with, particularly depending on your level of technicality on the computer.

Have you considered neuron or it's successor emanote?

Emanote! Very lightweight. One of the things I can't stand about Notion is its speed.

Also, I'm willing to mentor anyone who is interested in improving Ema or Emanote.

Clarification: Emanote is a successor to Neuron, and written on top of Ema.

I maintain an extended version of Emanote in Haskell (as an Ema app) that does custom stuff like visualize my hledger transactions, track time, generate invoice and provide custom views of my Markdown notebook, like a Twitter-like timeline generated from H2 headings (with date) from across notes.

I personally use literate programming to maintain my "dotfiles", mainly NixOS [1], and I _love_ it. I like to describe all possible alternative tools, why I don't use them, possible tools that look nice, random ideas and blog posts that describe parts of my config, add TODOs and screenshots, ... in short everything that is really ugly to do inside source code comments. Also I gain structure; adding headings to a 3000 LOC config is very nice.

For tangling I use lmt [2], as it works with Markdown and also play nice with Emanote [3] (full syntax highlighting inside the code blocks.). That means all my "dotfiles" are inside my Zettelkasten [4] and can be navigated like any other note I have.

[1]: https://nixos.org/

[2]: https://github.com/driusan/lmt

[3]: https://github.com/srid/emanote

[4]: https://zettelkasten.de/