I love this discussion! I think I sounded more sour on beancount than was
warranted -- I'm also excited about the community around ledger and plain
text accounting and that people are making other tools. And as someone who
loves Python and is writing my own helpers for ledger, I should be looking
at beancount to learn things! (Currently I'm working on a qif importer to
bring in 12 years of MS Money data and 5 years of KMyMoney.)
I suspect I have little to worry about with long term ledger maintenance --
I use a fairly small set of features for my personal finances.
As for the spaces, I could probably adapt to dashes, but I like the
readability with spaces, even using them after colons, e.g.:
2017/11/30 johnny paycheck
i: wages: gross pay $-2,100
i: wages: employer match $-63
e: taxes: federal $171.46
e: taxes: state $126.66
e: taxes: social security $130.2
e: taxes: medicare $30.45
e: healthcare: medical insurance $231.89
a: 401k: cash ($126 + $63)
a: fsa $41.67
a: checking $1,241.67
Using Sublime Text I've even gone all in with syntax highlighting. (Which
isn't space related, of course.) :-)
<https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-BN8UeEsZyjM/Wr9425eg5mI/AAAAAAAAKk0/qltfrA190X4VObuWqhVXMMxANDZn0ay-gCLcBGAs/s1600/Screen%2BShot%2B2018-03-31%2Bat%2B7.03.04%2BAM.png>
On Saturday, March 31, 2018 at 3:13:09 AM UTC-5, Martin Michlmayr wrote:
>
> * Stefano Zacchiroli <[email protected]> [2018-03-31 10:02]:
> > Maybe you can elaborate on why not supporting spaces in account names
> > bothered you? I also had to migrate to '-' as I had spaces in my Ledger
> > account names, but in the end I realized dashes are better anyway: they
> > don't get in the way of dumb text processing of your ledger, like grep,
> > sed, and the like. Just curious :)
>
> I can't speak for Scott but I think it's just what you're used to.
> I'm slowly getting used to the dashes and, as you say, they make
> parsing and stuff easier. But "Liabilities:Credit-Card" looks weird
> when you're used to "Liabilities:Credit Card". I'm sure I will get
> used to it in a few weeks though.
>
> In general, ledger is *extremely* permissive in what it allows. For
> example, Assets:♚_DASD!;?@#$!%^& *"(*(0-;♚ds is a perfectly valid
> account name in ledger. So I believe people moving from ledger to
> beancount might feel restricted in what they can do.
>
> Then again, I'm using the opportunity to clean up my account and
> commodity names, for example moving from "M&M" in ledger to MILESMORE
> in beancount. It will take some time getting used to the new names
> but in general I think I'll prefer them more longterm (quoted
> commodities in ledger are not ideal anyway because you have to
> double-quote them).
>
> --
> Martin Michlmayr
> http://www.cyrius.com/
>
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