CBB

CBB is a personal check book balancing utility for Unix/X. It was written by Curt L. Olson starting in 1994 with many contributions from others. For a quick description see the Article on CBB for Linux Journal by Curt Olson (1996).

It is written entirely in Perl and Tcl/Tk so it is very portable and very extendable. It is a program for anyone who would like to balance their checkbook and manage their money using free software under Unix and X11. See more details at

• CBB Original Manual (pdf)

• Ewen McNeill Blog.

• CBB Project fifi org

• Money Management in Linux by Curt Olson, Linux Journal, Issue #26, June 1996

I am a fan of CBB and I have been using it since 1997. Please don't let the fact that it's old, and will probably never have a new version dissuade you. This is still a great checkbook program.

As you can check the project stoped in Jun 2004. BUT, there is a bug in the 0.8.1 version: When I try (using TAB) to complete an entry I received the message. invalid command name "tkEntrySetCursor". After some tries I found out that this command was in the file /usr/local/lib/cbb/bindings.tcl. The solution was to add at the beggining of the file bindings.tcl a definition for tkEntrySetCursor. There are also some other minor problems. Details are here

See the description above for the reason I made these (UNNOFICIAL) patches based on the (last working) official Version 0.8.1. I hope the patch in this page is useful. If this was useful for you please send me an e-mail. If you know a better solution, please also contact me. I am still using CBB as of january 2021.

1. cbb V0.8.3.tgz (md5sum = e4d08c37d00e68885dfe595604babc85 is the current patched version released by me in September 2017.

2. cbb V0.8.2.tgz (md5sum = 926bfc8c0f80fd60b4be9715f2de2cbe) is the first patched version released by me around 2005. It did not worked with Debian 9.1.

I also leave here the last official versions released by Curt L. Olson:

1. cbb V0.8.1.tar.gz (md5sum= 7a435ef954c5c2ba209d34ca5fa5c3a7) is the last official version that worked. It was released around 2000.

2. cbb-0.9.5b.tgz (md5sum= d07cf564cd2e5a197abf3319c195ccf8) was the last version (beta) released around 2004. It did not work at all for me at the time and I have not used it at all.

You can check Md5sum for all files. with md5sum -c md5sum-cbb.txt

To install CBB (see INSTALL file):

1. Download the file.

2. tar xzvf cbb-0.X.Y.tgz

3. cd cbb-0.X.Y

4. ./configure

5. make

6. make install (as root). Default location for the binary cbb is in /usr/local/bin

7. Include cbb on your menu. If you are using XFCE copy the file cbb.desktop inside the directory XFCE to [your-home]/.local/share/applications

The default font now is Courier. But tou can edit ~.cbbrc.tcl and, following Ewen McNeill Blog, replace the default fonts by Tk standards fonts:

set cbb(msg_text_font) "TkIconFont"

set cbb(button_font) "TkCaptionFont"

set cbb(fixed_header_font) "TkFixedFont"

set cbb(fixed_font) "TkFixedFont"

set cbb(status_line_font) "TkMenuFont"

set cbb(menu_font) "TkMenuFont"

set cbb(dialog_font) "TkTextFont"

set cbb(default_font) "TkDefaultFont"