From the collection
Coffer
No. 024
Envelope budgeting over a plain-text hledger journal: Actual Budget’s experience, hledger’s data discipline, two-way. Atrium’s sibling, but for money, and with the polarity inverted: the journal is the database, any SQLite is a disposable read cache, and the app shells out to the hledger binary for its reports rather than reimplementing the ledger. The hard problem, and the reason the research phase is real, is a safe append-and-edit write-back path onto a file the user also edits by hand.
A coffer is both a strongbox for valuables and the recessed panel in a coffered ceiling; finance and architecture in one word, the same dual reading as Atrium. Phase 0: the design dossier is committed, the spec is not yet locked, no code exists.