hledger was inspired by and is partly a clone of John Wiegley's ledger.
I was a happy ledger user and contributor for some time; I still use it occasionally. I wrote hledger because I wanted to develop financial tools in the Haskell programming language and ecosystem, whose advantages I believe are compelling. I have also tried to make hledger a little more simple, usable, installable, documented, appealing to collaborators, and to provide alternate user interfaces to make it more widely useful.
ledger has more advanced power-user features on the command-line (periodic and modifier transactions, budgets, capital gains tracking, value expressions, custom output formats, etc.) and it remains faster and more memory efficient (for now!)...
hledger builds faster and has an up-to-date manual and an optional web interface (which often works on ledger files too)...
The two projects collaborate freely. We share the #ledger IRC channel but have separate mail lists (hledger list, ledger-cli list). I try to give back by providing infrastructure (ledger-cli.org) and IRC support. hledger stays compatible with ledger wherever possible, so that you can often use both tools on the same data file.
Summary: hledger is a friendly, co-evolving, compatible rewrite of ledger in Haskell, lacking some of ledger's power features and raw performance, and focussing on robustness, usability, ease of development, and experimental add-ons such as the web interface.
hledger mimics a subset of ledger 3.x, and adds some features of its own.
We currently support:
We do not support:
d>[DATE] or similarAnd we add these commands:
ledger options and commands not supported include:
Basic options:
-o, --output FILE write output to FILE
-i, --init-file FILE initialize ledger using FILE (default: ~/.ledgerrc)
-a, --account NAME use NAME for the default account (useful with QIF)
Report filtering:
-c, --current show only current and past entries (not future)
--period-sort EXPR sort each report period's entries by EXPR
-L, --actual consider only actual (non-automated) transactions
--budget generate budget entries based on periodic entries
--add-budget show all transactions plus the budget
--unbudgeted show only unbudgeted transactions
--forecast EXPR generate forecast entries while EXPR is true
-l, --limit EXPR calculate only transactions matching EXPR
-t, --amount EXPR use EXPR to calculate the displayed amount
-T, --total EXPR use EXPR to calculate the displayed total
Output customization:
-n, --collapse Only show totals in the top-most accounts.
-P, --by-payee show summarized totals by payee
-x, --comm-as-payee set commodity name as the payee, for reporting
--dow show a days-of-the-week report
-S, --sort EXPR sort report according to the value expression EXPR
--head COUNT show only the first COUNT entries (negative inverts)
--tail COUNT show only the last COUNT entries (negative inverts)
--pager PAGER send all output through the given PAGER program
-A, --average report average transaction amount
-D, --deviation report deviation from the average
-%, --percentage report balance totals as a percentile of the parent
--totals in the "xml" report, include running total
-j, --amount-data print only raw amount data (useful for scripting)
-J, --total-data print only raw total data
-y, --date-format STR use STR as the date format (default: %Y/%m/%d)
--balance-format --register-format --print-format
--plot-amount-format --plot-total-format --equity-format
--prices-format --wide-register-format
Commodity reporting:
--price-db FILE sets the price database to FILE (def: ~/.pricedb)
-L, --price-exp MINS download quotes only if newer than MINS (def: 1440)
-Q, --download download price information when needed
-O, --quantity report commodity totals (this is the default)
-V, --market report last known market value
-g, --performance report gain/loss for each displayed transaction
-G, --gain report net gain/loss
Commands:
xml [REGEXP]... print matching entries in XML format
equity [REGEXP]... output equity entries for matching accounts
prices [REGEXP]... display price history for matching commodities
entry DATE PAYEE AMT output a derived entry, based on the argumentshledger's file format is mostly identical with ledger's, by design. Generally, it's easy to keep a journal file that works with both hledger and ledger if you avoid ledger's most advanced features.
Some ledger features are parsed but ignored, eg:
Some features are not currently parsed and will cause an error, eg:
There can also be subtle differences in parser behaviour, eg comments may be permissible in different places.
hledger recognises description and negative patterns by "desc:" and "not:" prefixes, unlike ledger 3's free-form parser
hledger doesn't require a space before command-line option values, eg -fFILE or -f FILE works
hledger's weekly reporting intervals always start on mondays
hledger shows start and end dates of the intervals requested, not just the span containing data
hledger always shows timelog balances in hours
hledger splits multi-day timelog sessions at midnight
hledger doesn't track the value of commodities with varying price; prices are fixed as of the transaction date
hledger's output follows the decimal point character, digit grouping, and digit group separator character used in the journal.
hledger print shows amounts for all postings, and shows unit prices for amounts which have them. (This means that it does not currently print multi-commodity transactions in valid journal format.)
hledger print ignores the --date2 flag, always showing both dates. ledger print shows only the secondary date with --aux-date, but not vice versa.
hledger's default commodity directive (D) sets the commodity for subsequent commodityless amounts, and sets that commodity's display settings if such an amount is the first seen. ledger uses D only for commodity display settings and for the entry command.
hledger generates a description for timelog sessions, instead of taking it from the clock-out entry
hledger's include directive does not support shell glob patterns (eg include *.journal ), which ledger does.
ledger is written in C++, whereas hledger is written in the Haskell programming language. Haskell is a highly regarded up-and-coming language that enables a coding style known as pure functional programming, offering the promise of more bug-free and maintainable software built in fewer lines of code. Haskell also provides a more abstracted, portable platform which can make deployment and installation easier in some cases. Haskell also brings some new challenges such as managing memory growth and laziness.