@andrewleland

While I'm a vi/vim/ed guy rather than an Emacs guy, I'll gladly cheer you on in your #plaintext & #CLI adventures.

For my personal finances, I use `ledger` (https://ledger-cli.org/) for #plaintextaccounting and I know it has some Emacs scripts available to make it easier.

For calendaring, I'm a big advocate for using `remind` (https://dianne.skoll.ca/projects/remind/). It's incredibly powerful, and as a CLI tool, pipes well to other utilities.

I don't know if you have a preferred mail program—whether that's Gmail in a web-browser or Thunderbird for a rich-client, or a command-line mail program like mutt/neomutt or even classic `mail` (or its souped up cousin `s-nail`).

There's a "blinux" (blind Linux users) mailing list if that's your jam. I think it's at http://leb.net/blinux/blinux-list.html I'm not blind/VI myself, but I lurk on the list and try to answer the occasional question as I have opportunity, and have an appreciation of keeping CLI tools accessible.

Anyways, here's cheering you on.

ledger, a powerful command-line accounting system - ledger

Website and documentation for the open source command-line double-entry accounting system named ledger

@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CalDAV note), but for our household, it's great, and I wrote up a detailed blog post² on how I use it (it's a little out of date now, but still works).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 https://dianne.skoll.ca/projects/remind/
² https://blog.thechases.com/posts/remind/
³ https://taskwarrior.org/
https://github.com/todotxt/todo.txt-cli

Dianne Skoll's Web Site - Remind - Software Projects

@scy my personal accounting toolchain contains of
➝ Visual Studio Code for previewing CSV files and editing ledger files
➝ fossil for version management on a local server
➝ hledger for calculation and reporting

#PlainTextAccounting

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.

#Beancount #hledger #ledgerCLI #ledger #accounting #FOSS

Beancount
14%
hledger
58%
ledger
14%
something else (comment please)
14%
Poll ended at .

Seeking your input #hledger users,

https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/pull/2402 proposes to change how we check for balanced transactions; and if merged, next hledger version will reject some existing hledger files, requiring a (easy) workaround or fix. Any feedback or testing welcome.

Also, the setup command that was added in 1.43 needs user testing; let me know if it's reliable and describes your setup accurately. Feel free to share output eg at https://pub.microbin.eu .

#plaintextaccounting

Balance transactions more robustly and compatibly by simonmichael · Pull Request #2402 · simonmichael/hledger

When checking if a transaction is balanced, until now hledger has used a commodity's global display precision as its balancing precision. This turns out to be not ideal; one familiar annoyance ...

GitHub
Release 1.43.1 · simonmichael/hledger

Release notes hledger 1.43.1 Fixes cur: in posting-based reports like balance and register once again filters multicommodity amounts as it should. #2396 More error messages were made consistent, ...

GitHub

hledger 1.43 is out!
New `setup` command, better boolean queries, `add` assertions,
and more.

Thank you to contributors Michael Rees, Thomas Miedema, Dmitry Astapov, Pranesh Prakash, Stephen Morgan, Sam Almahri, Ben Sima, and Doug Goldstein.

- https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/releases/1.43
- https://hledger.org/relnotes.html#2025-06-01-hledger-143
- https://hledger.org/install

#hledger is free, robust, friendly, multicurrency, double-entry,
#plaintextaccounting software for unix, mac, windows, and the web,
written in #haskell for reliability.

Release 1.43 · simonmichael/hledger

Release notes hledger 1.43 new setup command, better boolean queries, add assertions, timeclock concurrent sessions, CSV if rules debug output Breaking changes Timeclock format now supports mult...

GitHub

#hledger 1.42.2 released, with an important fix for hledger's edit form. Details:
https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/releases/tag/1.42.2

#plaintextaccounting

Release 1.42.2 · simonmichael/hledger

Release notes hledger 1.42.2 Fixes The test command can pass options to tasty again (this broke in 1.42). Also, any arguments before -- are now passed to tasty as test-selecting -p options. #238...

GitHub

What's everyone's opinion about an automated tax calculation software?

https://lemm.ee/post/64083795

What's everyone's opinion about an automated tax calculation software? - lemm.ee

I’ve been using this software AccountingClassic and it has been great so far. I chose the free plan they have. It’s for 1 user, a hundred customers, 50 vendors, and has 1024 storage limit. But they’ve got 4$ and 8$ plan too. For now I’m trying this free plan they have. So far it’s great and life saving. No more headaches for me calculating taxes. Do you have any other software recommendation?

@mkennedy

On the recent @talkpython about Django Ledger with Miguel Sanda, it sounded like the project shares a lot of overlap with BeanCount/Fava from the #plaintextaccounting realm.

https://github.com/beancount/beancount

GitHub - beancount/beancount: Beancount: Double-Entry Accounting from Text Files.

Beancount: Double-Entry Accounting from Text Files. - beancount/beancount

GitHub