~ / hledger is superb

In the past few days I have been experimenting with managing me and my girlfriend's finances. Admittedly this has always been a daunting thing for me, it's not that I never tried using other solutions like excel or google spreadsheet but I always had some thing at the back of my mind that told me those solutions were not time efficient nor were they correct in their implementation.

What hledger gives me is a more appropriate file type for tracking finances in the .journal file. The strict double entry also makes the data feel reliable and correct. At it's heart it is just a plain text file but the surrounding ecosystem is super extensible. So much better than .csv.

I made claude code spin me up a go project that could easilly have an entry form similar to their web UI but with session management. Currently their implementation has more features but this good enough for my use for now.

Here is a talk from Simon Michael talking at length about the project.