The initial impetus was the difficulty in keeping GnuCash running happily on MacOS, despite the efforts of the fine folks at MacPorts. [1] In an interesting synchronicity, the most recent problem caused GnuCash to crash any time I tried to open the scheduled transaction editor. :-) This sort of thing (including that specific failure mode) has happened before, so I've decided not run GnuCash on MacOS any more and am now making do with an Ubuntu virtual machine, until I can get a replacement for GnuCash in place. (That should continue to work basically indefinitely, but I find working in VMs to be annoying and prefer to do so as little as possible.)
More generally, I'm not a fan of GnuCash's bulk -- and since I have MacPorts configured to build everything from source on one of my computers (for reasons that have nothing to do with GnuCash), a GnuCash upgrade often takes a really long time. (Any time I have to rebuild webkit-gtk, I know it's going to be a while.) I also like Ledger's use of a more human-readable data file format, because it works better with version control and particuarly merging and conflict resolution. (I do keep my Gnucash files, uncompressed, in version control, but I don't know of a version control system that really handles XML data particularly well -- certainly the odd merge and conflict have been pretty painful to resolve, both under SVN and Mercurial.) Of course, XML does have benefits -- in particular, I may yet reach a point when I'm tired of migrating data using the 10-fingered-transfer method and start trying to programmatically convert the XML. (At least it's 10 fingers, and not just 2!) Richard [1] Given that ragging on MacPorts is fashionable in certain quarters, I should point out that this isn't irony; I'm generally quite happy with their system. On Tuesday, July 8, 2014 8:46:08 PM UTC-4, Martin Blais wrote: > > Just curious... what are your reasons for switching away from GnuCash? > > > > On Tue, Jul 8, 2014 at 4:02 PM, Richard Cobbe <rco...@gmail.com > <javascript:>> wrote: > >> (Please forgive me if this is a duplicate post -- I'm fairly new to >> Google groups, and my first attempt apparently went off into the ether >> rather than showing up on this list.) >> >> I'm trying to transition from GnuCash to ledger, and I'm looking for an >> equivalent to GnuCash's scheduled transactions. I see from the ledger-mode >> manual that there's some support for this feature in Emacs, and I've played >> around with it and figured out how to do simple things, like scheduling a >> transaction to run every month on the 13th, say, by supplying a date in the >> form [*/*/13]. >> >> Is there a way to schedule a transaction to run every other Monday? I >> don't see how to fit that into the date syntax that's described in the >> manual. I took a quick look at ledger-schedule.el, and >> ledger-schedule-descriptor-regex appears to support more expressive date >> specifications than just [*/*/13], but it's going to take me a while to >> figure out what's going on here. In particular, >> ledger-schedule-constrain-day appears not to support all of the possible >> options that the regex appears to allow. >> >> Ledger 3.0.3-20140608 on MacOS 10.9.4, for what it's worth. Oh, and >> Emacs 24.3.1. >> >> Thanks! >> >> Richard >> >> -- >> >> --- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> "Ledger" group. >> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an >> email to ledger-cli+...@googlegroups.com <javascript:>. >> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. >> > > -- --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ledger" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to ledger-cli+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
