[simonmic]

> When Gnucash did something, I was never sure what actually happened. And sometimes it would crash. Was all my data safe? Hard to tell.

You express it exactly, I felt the same way with Gnucash, Quicken, and all the other non-plain-text accounting apps I tried. Finance was stressful enough without also worrying about messed-up data. That was perhaps the biggest motivation to switch to Ledger, when I found it.

Later, I often could not figure out how to make Ledger do something I knew it could do, and I often was surprised by a crash or wrong behaviour when it saw some new combination of features and data that hadn't been tested or implemented yet. This was a big motivation to write hledger.