Add a text console/terminal
A few projects exist out there that have attempted to make working with Gnucash data outside of Gnucash more feasible including CashUtil (for adding transactions through the command line), Ledger (for generating custom reports), pygnucash2ledger (to convert Gnucash data to text-based Ledger format). With the current Gnucash setup, making custom reports can be challenging and time consuming. Programs like Ledger allow for the data to be analyzed in text format making custom reports easier for those who know how to use programs like Gnuplot.
What I propose (and this certainly is not a simple request), is to have a tab in which users could interact with the data on a text based level where they can run some simple command such as the Ledger command line program offers.
For instance, a user would open the Gnucash console, and then type something along the lines of: "balance -monthly Expenses" and it would print the balance for the Expenses account on a monthly basis. This data could then be exported to a plotting program to produce a report.
My main reasoning for this is to have a way to display the Gnuplot data in a text format so that users can manipulate the output so that it can be read by programs like PyxPlot, Gnuplot, LaTeX, Excel, and text editors. While this is already possible by exporting the data to CSV or using pygnucash2ledger and analyzing the data in Ledger, I think it would be wonderful to be able to have a cross-platform text-based console that produces simple text output for users to query their data if and produce simple reports and extend the functionality of Gnucash.
Thomas
shared this idea
Thank you for your request. In itself it’s an interesting idea. It is however outside the scope a gnucash to add such console. It would add an unreasonable overhead of either maintaining a complete syntax internally or embedding another scripting language.
The closest that currently exist are the guile and python bindings which can be used to extract information from your gnucash data file in guile or python respectively. And even those are already less well maintained due to the lack of manpower/real world usage. They will probably do much of what you are looking for already.