Show HN: Poor Fox – A beautiful CLI app for keeping track of your expenses

github.com

8 points·diegomacario··5 comments

Hi everyone! I worked on this side project for a few months. I tried to make it as easy to use / visually appealing as possible. I have been using it for the past couple of months and it has really helped me be more conscious about my spending. I hope it can do the same for you. Thank you for checking it out!

Simply beautiful! Thank you! I've been looking for something lightweight like this for a long time. It's hard to find this sort of application without so much useless bloat. An elegant solution which will be easily extensible with my own scripts as needed. Nice job.

Thank you! I am still refactoring the code (there are a few hacks that I am not proud of). I hope it will be useful!

Question: if it's written in C, why does it require Chalk, a JS lib?

It is actually written in C++. Github says C because the SQLite files are a lot bigger than the ones I wrote. And Chalk is used because in the following way:

- The application creates a file called pfox_console_printout.js, which is hidden in your home directory.

- It writes the tables/graph line by line into that file. Each line starts with 'console.log(' or 'process.stdout.write(' and ends appropriately.

- When it is done writing it executes 'node pfox_console_printout.js' and all the data is displayed.

The reason I went through the trouble of doing all that is to have Windows support. I had a lot of issues with Unicode characters and with changing the colors of text in a way that worked in Unix and Windows. I also think that using Chalk simplifies the process of changing the colors, which will prove useful when I start supporting new color schemes!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com