I have been doing some rewriting of my accounting package, mostly using C++ and bash scripts.
A package that really deserves more attention is “sc”, an ncurses based spreadsheet. I like it because it is very lightweight, and of course works on a terminal. It lacks a lot of advanced features like graphs, has some learning curve, but it’s still pretty cool.
I have set up a spreadsheet manually with a set of accounts, using named fields to contain values that I will put in later. I put in appropriate formulas for subtotalling and totalling.
The sc file format is just plain text. This is great, because I can generate values programmatically. So, if the balance of my shopping is 1000, I can append the following line to the sc file let shop = 1000
I can then edit or view the resultant spreadsheet. Better yet, I can convert it to a text file programmatically using sc -W % financials.sc > financials.rep
I recommend Linux command-line freaks to check out the utility. It should be available in most good distro repos, without manual compilation. Slackware includes it by default, IIRC, Arch users can use pacman, and IIRC it is also available as a Debian/Ubuntu package.
Enjoy.
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