[chriseidhof]

In thinking a bit more, I think the biggest pain point for me is one with plain text in general: it supports no attachments. I have my own system to refer to specific files and built a Mac app that lets me drop a file on a transaction, then it copies that file into a specific folder and adds a tag to the transaction. This could be done so much easier if the data would be sqlite, but then you obviously lose the ability to edit it directly in your text editor.

[fsiefken]

You can perhaps use local file:// references in the files and open them in a browser, or you can use ledger from within a tool like Obsidian, LogSeq or DevonThink. Perhaps associate attachments in that way?

https://github.com/tgrosinger/ledger-obsidian

[chriseidhof]

oh yes, absolutely! I have a system that works well for me. But it's inherent to plain text files that they don't support attachments. It's plain text, after all.

[WorldMaker]

ZIP can be a useful container for when you want a plaintext file with attachments, but you also want the full folder structure transportable itself as a single file. Automating zip/unzip operations isn't too bad, and you sometimes easily can teach some applications to work directly with zip container streams, without a temporary folder, too. Some existing text editors can do it naturally already; emacs and vim both have native support. Others have plugins available, like VSCode has ZipFS [1] (which is also on the backlog of possible things to support out of the box [2]).

[1] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=arcanis....

[2] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/75559

[dheera]

You can paste the file as a base64 string. Disable word wrap and it should only appear as one line.

A good text editor of the future should recognize these base64 strings and make them appear like clickable files, but still let you right-click and go back to the plain text representation.

[balves]

Fava and beancount have some affordances here. You can make a data directory with a directory structure that matches your chart of accounts. Place datestamped files in here and they'll show up inline in your fava ledger view.

Additionally you can annotate a transaction with a "document" tag and that document will show up directly associated in the ui.

The ui has pretty good previewing for these. I add pdf versions of all of my statements, and attach receipts to specific transactions (business expenses, proof of paying taxes, etc.)

It works quite well