History
The history of rcheckbook is tied to that of another program written by Bryce, the creator of this program, called BCheckbook.
For the longest time, Bryce would keep track of his finances in a physical checkbook ledger, but he eventually gravitated towards doing things electronically.
He first started off with QuickBooks, which you could still buy standalone at the time, and while it worked, it came off as a bit complicated in some aspects.
Eventually, Bryce drifted toward GnuCash, which he found to be much simpler and stayed with for a very long time.
However, after living with GnuCash satisfactorily, and even enjoying being able to track his finances on his phone, which was an Android phone, he started to grow irritated by how some of his most used apps worked better on his iPad than his phone and he switched to iPhone.
After switching, he started looking around for stuff that could replace GnuCash, which did not exist on iOS, but none of the offerings were to his liking, as they seemed to be overly complex and/or had features he didn't need, so he decided to make his own app.
At the time he was making the app, called BCheckbook, SwiftUI was new on the scene, as was the ability to use a single codebase to write programs for both iOS and macOS, and was happy that he could be able to carry his data anywhere, like GnuCash did.
After launching the application on the app store, Bryce saw that, even though he had created something that he could call his own, that he was still tied to Apple's ecosystem, even though he enjoyed things in the ecosystem, and set about writing a program that could read this same data in Rust, which he had recently learned.
Thus, rcheckbook came into being. It was given the prefix r to denote that it was written in Rust.
Like its predecessor at the time, rcheckbook could only handle bcheck files, which were just json files with a different extension, with editing capabilities added only a few days later.
Over time, Bryce would work on and off with rcheckbook, bringing it inline with its original incarnation, such as transitioning to a database backend, adding support for TSV and QIF, with the latter not being supported until March 2025, three years after the original application initially got support.
However, in that timeframe, rcheckbook also got abilitities and support for things that original could not or did not have, such as the ability to filter transaction by more than just two details and gaining import and export support for Excel and ODS files.
After some time, Bryce discovered that he could no longer update the mac side of his original application because the app would no longer communicate with database, while the iOS side did not have that issue, and so, he has decided to make rcheckbook the main desktop client.
Today, rcheckbook has become an indepensible part of Bryce's life, especially as he embarks on another journey that makes him grateful that he had written it before he experiences the same troubles he had switching to iOS from Android.