I built a web interface for hledger-files. It is just a simple html-file with Javascript. Load the file in your browser, throw your ledger file into the web interface, and you get three tabs with transactions, balance sheet and P&L.
Download it from github: hledger-webuix.html
I have tried it now (with bcexample.hledger). That is very slick - congrats!
It lets you edit transactions, but doesn't yet save them in place; instead it lets you download an updated copy of the journal. hledger-textual writes in place, and might be a source of ideas.
Many people are cautious about showing their private data to AI-generated code, which might accidentally upload or expose it some day. Even a small amount of code like this might be too much for a human to check. How to increase confidence ? I guess the readme could suggest a command to grep the file for urls, upload commands etc. Maybe claude can suggest other ways.
“Many people are cautious about showing their private data to AI-generated code”: I never thought about that but you are right. Maybe one day I will grep through the html to see if anything suspicious is happening. For now I think I must just trust claude.io.
The way I uncreased my confidence in this to try it with my personal ledger was to open the web console and watch for any network traffic while clicking through a test ledger. I did not see any network calls; cookies, session, and local storage were all clear. This gave me confidence that this is local. — if there's some other way to transmit information from the browser which isn't through the network or stores… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
After trying this — and adding Fava charts; since I've always wanted this — I realized that the tool does not work well with journals which manage multiple commodities. Matter of fact, looked like what was happening was that the tool stripped the amount of its commodity and assumes one commodity for all transactions. This yields false reports on all levels. I'm currently trying to see how to make the tool handle journals with multiple currencies with more grace.
Not to derail the topic, but Reddit might be worth testing as well.