4 posts were merged into an existing topic: Plain Text Accounting (PTA) (Hacker News 2024)
Thanks again to Marco Fioretti and Linux Magazine, this is a great hledger intro!
Here are my notes, as promised on mastodon.
The multiplatform hledger can be used from a phone
I guess this is referring to viewing a remote hledger-web server in the web browser ?
Or perhaps running hledger in something like Termux on Android phones ?
Listing 1
I think the negative assets:bank balance here can create some confusion.
Is it just because these amounts are random ?
Or is it because of your personal sign convention (see below) ? But, assets:cash is positive.
money amounts must have a currency prefix (E for euro)
A currency symbol or name is usual, but not required.
(And of course € or EUR could have been used there, it didn't have to be E.)
expenses:food. E100
The period after food might be a typo ?
"2023/03/01 2023/05/15"
The other variants are valid, but not this one.
latest stable version (version 1.33.1 at time of writing)
1.40 now (on 2024-09-20).
you must download the corresponding ZIP archive from the website
Some of the binary packaging systems add the latest release pretty fast;
it might not be necessary to download a bindist from github.
(unpack instructions)
For the exact unpack instructions, the github release page will be the most up to date.
Eg Release 1.40 · simonmichael/hledger · GitHub > How to install > (your platform).
Listing 3
In recent hledger versions, weekly reports look best when you pick a monday as the start date
(for more readable headings).
hledger-web ... will exit as soon as you close that tab or do nothing for two minutes
To be precise: it will exit after two minutes of not being open in any browser tabs .
The Sign Problem
I was a little sad that you chose to use signs opposite to standard PTA practice!
It's a valid choice, but you could mention it much earlier, before the example outputs and charts ?
I'm also having trouble seeing the consistency in signs between listings.
I'm still not quite sure if signs were flipped in the journal, or at report time by using the --invert flag; so I'll just note that this flag exists, and is another way to see the signs one wants.
I had to use sed because the option to use another field separator didn't work.
I expected separator | to work, but it failed for me too.
Sorry about that, I have opened #2236.
pass it to hledger with the --rules-file option
I think you know this but since I see many people using --rules-file,
I'll just note it's not needed if the rules file is named like the data file with .rules added.
for every single line in my original journal, lines 8 and 9 generate a conversion rule for hledger.
And folks can see some more examples of csv rules in the manual.
I also need things (e.g., charts with the rolling average of some account over a certain period) that, as far as I can tell, are not possible with hledger without custom programming.
Possibly doable with -A/--average and hledger-plot (on Scripts page) ?