User-visible changes in the hledger command line tool and library.

1.41 2024-12-09

Breaking changes

• Accounts named "equity:conversion", "equity:trading", or "equity:trade(s)", which are detected as type V/Conversion, will now revert to type E/Equity instead if any other account has been declared as type V/Conversion.

• When built with ghc 9.10.1, hledger shows two extra newlines after any error message.

Fixes

• A somewhat severe, though hopefully rare, valuation bug has been fixed. In certain circumstances, values could be calculated inaccurately, because of display-rounding occurring inappropriately during calculations. [#2254]

  Specifically: when there was no direct P price for the target commodity, so that hledger had to convert via a chain of prices, and if all of those price amounts had too few decimal places, then the result could be inaccurate. An example:

  P 2000-01-01 A   10.5 B
  P 2000-01-01 B  100.5 C
  
  2000-01-01
      (a)    100 A
  
  $ hledger-1.40 print -X C
  2000-01-01
      (a)        105520 C   ; wrong
  
  $ hledger-1.41 print -X C
  2000-01-01
      (a)        105525 C   ; right
  

• bs/bse/cf/is's HTML output no longer includes excess heading cells, and bs/bse's HTML output no longer shows an inappropriate Total heading with -T. (balancesheet does not support -T.) (Henning Thielemann)

• Balance commands' HTML, CSV and FODS output now show tree mode properly indented (using no-break spaces). (Henning Thielemann)

• In the HTML output of bs/bse/cf/is reports, Net amounts in the Net row are now formatted like the others. (Bas van Dijk)

• In bs/bse/cf/is HTML output, some unnecessary TH cells have been fixed. [#2225] (Henning Thielemann)

• The print command now ignores a depth limit entirely. Previously, a depth limit caused it to show only transactions referencing accounts as deep or deeper than that.

• In the roi command, a division by zero error (when all assets were sold) has been fixed. [#2281] (Dmitry Astapov)

• In a multi-line comment generated by CSV rules, tags on all lines now work (ie, can be matched). Posting dates in comments generated from CSV also now work. [#2241]

• hledger's bash shell completions are now up to date with the latest CLI. [#986]

• When showing output with a pager, if $PAGER is set to something not found in PATH, we now ignore it instead of raising an error.

• hledger --color=yes | less -R now shows bold headings as you'd expect.

Features

• The print, register and aregister commands now support HTML and FODS output, and the bs/bse/cf/is commands now support FODS output. This means all of the "STANDARD REPORTS" commands, and the balance command, now support text, HTML, CSV, TSV, or FODS output. (Henning Thielemann)

• When generating HTML output with the register or balance commands, the --base-url option will add hyperlinks to hledger-web, allowing you to view the detailed transactions if you have hledger-web running. (Henning Thielemann)

• Reports can now specify different display depths for certain accounts, rather than showing all accounts with the same depth limit. Multiple --depth=ACCTREGEX=DEPTH options (or depth:ACCTREGEX=DEPTH arguments can be used. For example, this will clip all accounts matching "assets" to depth 3, all accounts matching "expenses" to depth 2, and all other accounts to depth 1: --depth assets=3 --depth expenses=2 --depth 1 (Stephen Morgan, #2292)

• In unix-like environments, hledger now uses a pager ($PAGER, less, or more) for all large terminal output, not just for help. You can override this with the new --pager option. The pager is expected to handle hledger's ANSI colour output (unless you disable that). If less is used, it will be configured automatically, or you can override this by setting options in a HLEDGER_LESS environment variable.

• The print command's beancount output is now much more Beancount-compatible [#2295]. Other than using --alias to provide the top-level account names Beancount requires, you should rarely have to do anything special to produce a journal that bean-check accepts. hledger will automatically adjust problematic names, encode unsupported characters, and so on. See hledger: Beancount output for the full details.

  This supersedes the ledger2beancount tool, and makes using Beancount tools, especially Fava, practical for hledger users. In many cases this should just work:

  hledger [ALIASES] print -o tmp.beancount; fava tmp.beancount
  

Improvements

• if blocks in CSV rules now allow & ! (AND NOT) on the same line.

• When reading .latest files, whitespace is now ignored, and any date parse failure is reported with the file and line number.

• In journal format, P directives now require a space after the first symbol, preventing surprises like P 2024-10-31 a0 1 parsed as P 2024-10-31 a 01. [#2280]

• aregister has a new --heading=YN option, for disabling the report heading. (Henning Thielemann)

• aregister now supports the --invert and --cumulative flags, like the register command. (Henning Thielemann)

• The balance commands' HTML and FODS output now shows table borders consistently. (Henning Thielemann)

• In the balance commands' HTML output, row headings now span multiple rows when appropriate, rather than being repeated. (Henning Thielemann)

• Balance commands now support --transpose when generating HTML output. (Henning Thielemann)

• The balance command's --layout=tidy now affects HTML and FODS output at least to some extent (not just CSV output). And it always disables the totals row. (Henning Thielemann)

• The balance command's FODS output now picks a report title based on the report mode: "Balance Report", "Multi-period Balance Report", or "Budget Report". (Henning Thielemann)

• balance and aregister's HTML output will now use a hledger.css file if present, like bs/bse/cf/is.

• bs/bse/cf/is now support the --count (postings count) report type, like balance.

• The balance commands' options help has had some cleanup.

• The error messages from check accounts and check recentassertions are now clearer.

• The check commodities command now also checks commodities used in P directives. [#2280]

• The commodities command now also list commodities mentioned in P directives. [#2280]

• All of hledger's internal hidden (but searchable) tags can now be made visible by print --verbose-tags, which is useful for troubleshooting --infer-equity, --infer-costs, and the detection of redundant costs and conversion postings. Also,

  • Some hidden tags have been renamed for clarity: _modified is now _modified-transaction, _cost-matched is now _cost-posting, _conversion-matched is now _conversion-posting.
  • The generated-posting: tag added by --infer-equity is now valueless.
  • The modified-transaction: tag added by --auto now appears on its own line.

• Using the -NUM shortcut (for --depth NUM) in a config file now works.

• Setting the --color option in a config file now works (except it does not affect --debug output, currently).

• The --color option's suggested values are now yes/y, no/n, or auto/a. always and never are no longer documented, though still supported.

• More compact and informative --debug=2 output during valuation. Market prices are now shown using one line each, the known prices are listed, and the status of --infer-market-prices is shown. [#2287]

• More informative --debug=7 output from CSV rules.

• The hledger packages have a new debug build flag. Builds made with ghc 9.10+ and this flag will show some kind of stack trace if the program exits with an error. (These will improve in future ghc versions.)

• Disabled the unused ghcdebug build flag and ghc-debug support, for now.

• Allow megaparsec 9.7.

• ghc 9.10 / base 4.20 are now supported.

Docs

• Windows: added tips for setting LEDGER_FILE (Amadeusz Wieczorek, hledger_site#119)
• csv: if blocks: explain matchers and field names better [#2289]
• import: rewrite; rename "date skipping" to "overlap detection"
• import: added tips for first import
• assertions: mention their behaviour with posting status
• journal: rewrite the Tags section
• pager: note that help -p TOPIC uses less; link to less FAQ
• query types: updates, add headings, mention tag:'s infix matching
• Regular expressions: note possible RTL/bidi limitation (?)
• Special characters: rewrite, more precision, mention some Windows differences
• Output formats: expand, document beancount and FODS output
• Text output: expand/consolidate terminal topics
• FODS output: describe the advantages over CSV (Henning Thielemann)
• Debug output: note that the --debug option doesn't work in config files.
• bal: improve --layout doc
• bal: also mention hledger.css and text encoding in balance doc
• html: note safari text encoding issue
• timedot: mention the common journal+timedot file setup [#2238]
• Install, manual: new shell completions doc. [#986]
• Config files: rewrite [#2231]
• examples/csv: an example of YNAB 4 data, and RTL text, with a workaround
• examples: hledger2beancount.conf

Scripts/addons

• bin/*: remove obsolete _FLAGS markers from --help
• examples/csv/csv-hledger-1.py: a python-based CSV converter script

API

• Hledger.Utils.IO's ansi color helpers now respect the --color option.
• Hledger.Utils.IO.rgb' now takes Float arguments instead of Word8.
• Hledger.Cli.Commands.Balance: export budgetReportAs* functions, for use in scripts. (Dmitry Astapov)

1.40 2024-09-09

Fixes

• Account tags (and type declarations) declared in multiple files are now combined correctly. [#2202]

• Several kinds of report interval now choose a better start date:

  • every Nth day of month from DATE with periodic transactions [#2218]
  • every M/D from DATE
  • every Nth WEEKDAY from DATE

• The balance commands' HTML output no longer repeats the "Total" and "Net" headings when the totals row has multiple lines. And the layout has been improved and made more consistent with the text output.

• The --tldr flag now also works with the tealdeer tldr client.

• hledger check tags no longer warns about the internal _price-matched tag being undeclared (and that tag has been renamed to _cost-matched). [#2247]

• hledger check accounts no longer warns about the special equity:conversion account being undeclared (the default account used by --infer-equity).

Features

• You can now save command line options in a config file, to be added to your hledger commands either on demand or automatically. (This supersedes the older arguments files feature.)

  This much-requested new feature has pros and cons, and is experimental; your testing and feedback is welcome. It changes the nature of hledger somewhat, which I have marked by giving this release a more memorable version number (1.40).

• The balance commands can now output in FODS format, an XML spreadsheet file format readable by LibreOffice. (Henning Thielemann)

• The register report can now be sorted by date, account, amount, absolute amount, description, or a combination of these. (Michael Rees, [#2211])

Improvements

• All the balance-like commands now support FODS output, not just balance. (Henning Thielemann)

• Config files can now also provide the command name. If the first thing in a config file's general section is a non-flag argument, that will be used as the command name argument, taking precedence over any command line arguments. This makes config files strictly more powerful than the older argument files.

• Improved debug output for command line and config file processing.

• The print command's beancount output is now better at producing Beancount-ready data, converting hledger account names and commodity names to Beancount-compatible ones.

• Command line processing has been overhauled and should be more robust in certain cases, with tweaked error messages and debug output. Command-specific flags can now optionally appear before the command name. (Though writing them afterward is usually more readable. Addon-specific flags must still come last, after --.)

• The --rules-file option has been renamed to --rules. The old spelling is still supported as a hidden option.

• Weekly reports' week headings are now more compact, especially in single-year balance reports. ([#2204], Victor Mihalache)

• The balance command with no report interval, and also balance --budget, now support html output. (Henning Thielemann)

• In balance commands' html and csv output, "Total:" and "Net:" headings are now capitalised consistently.

• bs/cf/is reports now show the report interval in their title.

• The balance commands' text output with the --pretty flag now shows an outer table border and inter-column borders.

• The check recentassertions error message is now more readable.

• Timedot format now allows comment lines to be indented.

• When running the tldr-node-client client, auto-update of the tldr database is now suppressed.

• When running a tldr client fails, the warning now mentions the required --render flag. [#2201]

• The error message for unsupported regular expressions like (?:foo) has been improved.

• --debug has moved to "General help flags", making it available in more situations.

• Some verbose debug output from command line processing has been demoted to level 2.

• Parsing timedot files now gives debug output at level 9.

• Allow doclayout 0.5.

Docs

• The hledger/hledger-ui/hledger-web manuals now list all command options as shown by --help.
• Added an example config file, hledger.conf.sample.
• The diff and prices commands' help layout has been improved.
• add's doc described the effect of D wrongly, now fixed.
• Date adjustments: rewrites and corrections
• Period headings: added
• Input: clarify that multiple -f options are allowed
• Scripts and add-ons: edits, list add-ons again
• Timeclock: edits, fix ti/to scripts
• Fixed "hledger and Ledger" links [hledger_site#112]
• examples/csv: Monzo CSV rules added
• examples/csv: Tiller CSV rules added
• examples/csv: Nordea CSV rules added (Arto Jonsson)

Scripts/addons

• bin/bashrc updates; add years, eachyear scripts
• bin/hledger-simplebal: ignore config files
• bin/hledger-script-example: explain shebang commands better
• bin/hledger-register-max: update/fix

1.34 2024-06-01

Breaking changes

• check ordereddates no longer supports --date2. Also (not a breaking change): --date2 and secondary dates are now officially deprecated in hledger, though kept for compatibility.

Features

• You can now get a quick list of example command lines for hledger or its most useful subcommands by adding the --tldr flag (or just --tl). For best appearance you should install the tldr client, though it's not required.

  These short "tldr pages" are a great counterbalance to verbose PTA docs. You can also use tldr without hledger to view the latest versions, or translations:
  tldr hledger[-COMMAND]. Or you can browse tldr pages online. Consider contributing translations! More tips at https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/tree/master/doc/tldr.

Improvements

• The hledger commands list has been reorganised, with commands listed roughly in the order you'll need them.

• The general flags descriptions in --help have been updated and grouped.

• Correctness checks now run in a documented order. commodities are now checked before accounts, and tags before recentassertions. When both ordereddates and assertions checks are enabled, ordereddates now runs first, giving more useful error messages.

• -I/--ignore-assertions is now overridden by -s/--strict (or check assertions), enabling more flexible workflows. Eg you can alias hl="hledger -I" to delay balance assertions checking until you add -s to commands.

• --color and --pretty now also accept y or n as argument.

• When built with the ghcdebug flag and started with --debug=-1, hledger can be controlled by ghc-debug clients like ghc-debug-brick or a ghc-debug query script, for analysing memory/profile info.

Fixes

• hledger COMMAND --man and hledger help TOPIC --man now properly scroll the man page to the TOPIC or COMMAND heading. The exact/prefix matching behaviour has been clarified in help --help.

• In journal files, include directives with trailing whitespace are now parsed correctly.

• The help command's help flags are now consistent with other commands (and it has --debug as a hidden flag).

• Build errors with GHC 8.10 have been fixed. #2198

Docs

• The tables of contents on hledger.org pages now just list top-level headings, (and the hledger manual structure has been adjusted for this). This makes the hledger manual on hledger.org more scannable and less scary.
• add: drop lengthy transcript, add simpler example commands (from tldr)
• Amount formatting: move down, it's not the best first topic
• balance: mention the --summary-only flag
• check: expand check descriptions
• examples: CSV rules: vanguard, fidelity, paypal updates
• Generating data: rewrite
• JSON output: link to OpenAPI spec
• manuals: synopsis, options cleanup/consistency
• Options: correction, NO_COLOR does not override --color
• PART 4: COMMANDS: reorganise into groups, like the CLI commands list.
• Period expressions: mention last day of month adjusting #2005
• Secondary dates: expand, and declare them deprecated.
• Time periods cleanup, simplify markup
• Unicode characters: mention UTF-8 on windows

Scripts/addons

• Added hledger-pricehist, an alias for the pricehist market price fetcher so that it can appear in hledger's commands list.

1.33.1 2024-05-02

• process >=1.6.19.0 seems not strictly needed and is no longer required, improving installability. #2149

• print and close now show a trailing decimal mark on cost amounts also, when needed to disambiguate a digit group mark.

• The balance commands' HTML output now includes digit group marks when appropriate (fixes a regression in 1.25). #2196

• The add command no longer shows ANSI escape codes in terminals that don't support them.

• Doc updates:

  • import: Skipping -> Date skipping, discuss commodity styles more
  • csv: Amount decimal places: expand, note import behaviour

1.33 2024-04-18

Breaking changes

• expr: boolean queries, introduced in hledger 1.30 (2023), no longer allow date: to be used within an OR expression, avoiding unclear semantics which confuse our reports. If you'd like to improve this, see #2178. #2177 #2178

• Some error messages (date parse errors, balance assertion failures) have changed, which might affect error-parsing add-ons like flycheck-hledger.

Fixes

• add, import, web: On MS Windows, don't allow writing to files whose name ends with a period, since it can cause data loss; raise an error instead. I made this change in hledger 1.15 (2019), but it never worked; now it does. #1056

• balance --budget: The budget report in tree mode was omitting parent accounts with no actual or goal amounts and a single child, instead of showing them as a prefix of the child's name. Now it always shows them, on a line of their own (a bit like --no-elide). It's not a perfect fix, but the budget report code is twisty. #2071

• check tags: The special date and date2 tags, and the modified and _modified tags generated by --auto, are now also implicitly declared. #2148, #2119

• Regular expression match group references in CSV if rules, added in hledger 1.32, did not work right when multiple if conditions matched a CSV record. This is now fixed; match group references are now scoped to their local if block. #2158 (Jonathan Dowland)

• roi now correctly interacts with --value. #2190 (Dmitry Astapov)

• hledger now requires process-1.6.19.0+ to avoid any vulnerabilities on Windows from HSEC-2024-0003.

Features

• close has had some enhancements for usability (#2151):

  • It now excludes equity accounts by default; and always excludes the balancing account.

  • It has new --assert and --assign modes, for generating transactions which make balance assertions or balance assignments. There is also a --assertion-type option for changing the assertion/assignment type.

  • It adds a tag to generated transactions, named start, assert or retain depending on the mode.

  • The start tag's value will be a guess of the new file's name, inferred by incrementing a year number in the current file name. Eg, hledger close --migrate on 2024.journal will add the tag start:2025.journal to both transactions. Tags like this can be helpful when reading multiple files, for excluding closing and opening balances transactions (eg with not:tag:start=2025).

  • You can set different tag values by writing the mode option with an argument. Eg: hledger close --migrate=NEWFILENAME.

  • close now supports --round for controlling display of decimal places, like print.

  • examples/multi-year/ is examples/tutorial for managing multiple files with the close command.

Improvements

• stats has had some improvements:

  • It now also shows some information about memory usage, when hledger is built or is running with the GHC Run Time System available. (Try hledger stats +RTS -T.)

  • The default output is now more private, hiding file paths and commodity symbols. Those can be added by the new -v/--verbose flag.

  • Output is now more compact and more likely to fit in 80-character lines.

  • When generating multiple outputs with a report interval, reports are now separated by an empty line.

• Several more kinds of Unicode space are allowed for separating digit groups in numbers. We now support (my guess of the ones that might show up in real world CSV files): space, no-break space, en space, em space, punctuation space, thin space, narrow no-break space, medium mathematical space.

• Glob patterns in $LEDGER_FILE are now respected. Eg, setting it to *.journal' or 2???.journal now works as expected.

• When hledger is reading a symbolically-linked journal file, relative paths in include directives are now evaluated relative to the directory of the real linked file, not the directory containing the symbolic link.

• Date parse errors are now simpler and clearer. They no longer try to repeat (a reconstruction of) the problem date, since the actual problem date is already visible in the highlighted file excerpt.

• Balance assertion error messages are clearer, and show the difference between expected and actual balance again. With --debug=2 they also show costs.

• tsv: and ssv: file name prefixes are now supported in addition to csv:. They force the file to be read as a .tsv (tab separated values) or .ssv (semicolon-separated values) file. #2164 (Michael Rees)

• In CSV rules files, commented lines are now allowed within "if tables". (Dmitry Astapov)

• balance --budget's CSV and TSV output now shows zeroes instead of nothing when there's no amount.

• bs,bse,cf,is: Report sections which are empty now show zero as their subtotal. (aragaer)

• print and close add a trailing decimal mark when needed to disambiguate a single digit group mark. They now also do this for balance assertion and balance assignment amounts. #2176

• hledger can now be built with GHC 9.8.

• hledger now requires safe >=0.3.20.

Docs

• add version annotations for features added in 1.32 (hamzashezad)
• add Text encoding section, mention UTF-8 BOM support #2189
• journal: note that payee and tag directives can't have tags in comments, unlike account.
• journal: clarify how auto postings work.
• journal: list built-in special tag names
• journal: description/payee/note: clarify
• journal: amounts/commodities/numbers: cleanups
• journal: move intro before cheatsheet
• journal: transactions: explain transaction balancing #2135
• journal: transactions: mention debits, credits and sign
• journal: commodity directive: clarify & fix scope of effects #2135
• journal: D directive: clarify scope #2191
• journal: split Decimal marks, Digit group marks
• journal: move complex commodity styles, lot notation topics later
• journal: drop redundant/wrong Querying with cost or value section
• journal: cheatsheet: cleanups
• journal: assertions and ordering/commodities/subaccounts: cleanups
• csv: matchers: clarify, mention !/& limitation #2088
• csv: if tables: explain comments and order of application (Dmitry Astapov)
• add: document the effect of D default commodity directive #815
• balance: cleanups
• balance: budget report: moved "Budgets and subaccounts" to the Cookbook.
• bs,bse,cf,is: update sample output
• bse: note requirements for checking the accounting equation
• close: rewrite, give a better technique for excluding opening/closing balance txns #2151
• import: rename "deduplication" to "skipping", and rewrite
• examples: expand READMEs, clarify status for examples
• examples: invoicing: cleanups, renames
• examples: invoicing: pandoc-make-invoice: don't write to $LEDGER_FILE; remove the REMOVE THIS LINE line
• examples: csv: daedalus-transactions: update for current daedalus #2171
• examples: shared-finances/

Scripts/addons

• hledger-bar, hledger-simplebal: shellcheck fixes, cleanups (Colin Dean)

• hledger-bar: Fix an error when NO_COLOR is not defined #2159. Also, it's now more compliant with the no-color.org spec:

  Command-line software which adds ANSI color to its output by default should check for a NO_COLOR environment variable that, when present and not an empty string (regardless of its value), prevents the addition of ANSI color.

  so one can now temporarily override $NO_COLOR=1 in the environment by setting it empty: NO_COLOR= hledger ...

• hledger-txnsbycat: added

API

• move readFileStrictly to hledger-lib:Hledger.Utils.IO

1.32.3 2024-01-28

Fixes

• A performance slowdown since 1.29, especially noticeable with many accounts and transactions, has been fixed. [#2153]

• Balance assertions involving mixed-cost balances are checked correctly again (a regression in 1.30). [#2150]

• import --catchup works again (a regression in 1.32). #2156

• --anon is now a deprecated hidden flag that raises an error, but is still usable as --obfuscate (also hidden). [#2133]

• Balance assertion error messages are clearer, and show the diff again.

1.32.2 2023-12-31

Fixes

• In CSV field assignments, %FIELD interpolation and \n can be used together again. [#2134]

• In timedot data, numbers beginning with a decimal point are accepted again. [#2130]

• In a balance --budget report, --layout=tall no longer hides commodity symbols.

• Value reports seeing a pathological price chain with 1000 or more steps now write their warning to the console, not a debug log file.

Improvements

• Allow megaparsec 9.6

Docs

• Updated: Queries, Periodic transactions, Auto postings, Assertions and costs, Budget report

1.32.1 2023-12-07

• Fixed: import with multiple files now updates .latest files correctly. (#2125)

• Fixed: print --round=hard now properly pads/rounds amounts with inferred costs. (#2123)

• CSV matcher syntax: mention that ! and & can't be used in the same line yet. (#2088)

• Drop the "a difference of ..." line from balance assertion failure output. I feel it made the message harder to read and isn't really necessary.

• Declaring the empty payee name with payee "" now works, to let hledger check payees accept payee-less transactions. (#2119)

• Built-in tags with special meaning like type: and t: are now implicitly declared, so using type: in account declarations or generating t: with timedot letters won't cause hledger check tags to fail. (#2119)

1.32 2023-12-01

Breaking changes

• Display styles and display precision are now managed more carefully during calculations and output, fixing a number of issues (#2111, "Precisiongeddon"). In brief:

  • Cost and value reports, such as print -V, now (1) consistently apply commodity display styles, and (2) do not add or discard decimal digits unnecessarily. (#2105)

  • When "infinite decimals" arise during calculations (eg in value reports, or in prices or roi output), these are now shown limited to 8 decimal digits rather than 255.

  • Non-print-like reports no longer add trailing decimal marks to disambiguate digit group marks (this was an unintended regression in 1.31). (#2115)

  • We now document number formatting adjustments made in certain reports and output formats (hledger manual > REPORTING CONCEPTS > Amount formatting, parseability).

Features

• Timedot format supports a new letters syntax for easier tagged time logging. (#2116)

• print has a new beancount output format for exporting to Beancount. This prints journal output more likely (though not guaranteed) to be readable by Beancount.

• In CSV rules, matchers using regular expressions can now interpolate their matched texts into the values they assign to fields (field assignment values can reference match groups). (#2009) (Jonathan Dowland)

• In CSV rules, matchers can be negated by prepending !. (#2088) (bobobo1618)

• Multi-column balance reports (from bal, bs, is etc.) can use the new --summary-only flag (--summary also works) to display just the Total and Average columns (if enabled by --row-total and -A/--average) and hide the rest. (#1012) (Stephen Morgan)

• All commands that suport csv output now also support tsv (tab-separated values) output. The data is identical, but the fields are separated by tab characters and there is no quoting or escaping. Tab, carriage return, and newline characters in data are converted to spaces (this should rarely if ever happen in practice). (#869) (Peter Sagerson).

Improvements

• Journal format no longer fails to parse Ledger-style lot costs with spaces after the {, improving Ledger compatibility.

• import now does not update any .latest files until it has run without error (no failing strict checks, no failure while writing the journal file). This makes it more idempotent, so you can run it again after fixing problems.

• print now shows zeros with a commodity symbol and decimal digits when possible, preserving more information.

• print has a new option for controlling amount rounding (#2085):

  • --round=none - show amounts with original precisions (default; like 1.31; avoids implying less or more precision than was recorded)

  • --round=soft - add/remove decimal zeros in non-cost amounts (like 1.30 but also affects balance assertion amounts)

  • --round=hard - round non-cost amounts (can hide significant digits)

  • --round=all - round all amounts and costs

  For the record: print shows four kinds of amount: posting amounts, balance assertion amounts, and costs for each of those. Past hledger versions styled and rounded these inconsistently. Since 1.31 they are all styled, and since 1.32 they are rounded as follows:

  hledger-1.32 print	amt	cost	bal	balcost
  (default)	none	none	none	none
  --round=soft	soft	none	soft	none
  --round=hard	hard	none	hard	none
  --round=all	hard	hard	hard	hard

• The prices command has had a number of fixes and improvements (#2111):

  • It now more accurately lists the prices that hledger would use when calculating value reports (similar to what you'd see with hledger bal -V --debug=2).

  • The --infer-reverse-prices flag was confusing, since we always infer and use reverse prices; it has been renamed to --show-reverse.

  • --show-reverse and --infer-market-prices flags now combine properly.

  • --show-reverse now ignores zero prices rather than giving an error.

  • Price amounts are now shown styled.

  • Price amounts are now shown with all their decimal digits; or with 8 decimal digits if they appear to be infinite decimals (which can arise with reverse prices).

  • Filtering prices with cur: or amt: now works properly.

Fixes

• print now styles balance assertion costs consistently, like other amounts.

• import now works with -s/--strict. And more generally, when reading multiple input files, eg with multiple -f options, strict checks are done only for the overall combined journal (not for each individual file). (#2113)

• tag: queries now work when reading CSV files. (#2114)

• Using a .json or .sql file extension with -o/--outputfile now properly selects those output formats.

• Auto postings no longer break redundant equity/cost detection and transaction balancing. (#2110)

• Amounts set by balance assignment now affect commodity styles again. (#2091, a regression in 1.30)

• Timedot quantities with units are parsed more accurately. Eg a quantity like "15m" was evaluated as 0.249999999 not 0.25, and since hledger 1.21, it was printed that way also. Now we round such quantities to two places during parsing to get exact quarter-hour amounts. (#2096)

• The demo command no longer triggers a JSON decode error in asciinema 2.3.0. It now also shows a better error message if asciinema fails (#2094).

• Failing balance assertions with a cost now show correct markers in the error message. (#2083)

Docs

• New:

  • Amount formatting, parseability
  • Started new code docs for developers, based in the Hledger module's haddock

• Updated:

  • aregister
  • commodity directive
  • Commodity display style
  • if table
  • Decimal marks, digit group marks
  • Regular expressions
  • Timedot

1.31 2023-09-03

Features

• Multi-pivot: the --pivot option now accepts multiple arguments, colon-delimited, to construct account names from multiple fields. (#2050, Eric Mertens)

Improvements

• The print command now more closely replicates the original journal amount styles, which is helpful when round-tripping / cleaning up journal files:

  • Amounts in conversion transactions could be displayed rounded to a lower precision; this no longer happens. (#2079)

  • Amounts could be displayed with extra zeros after the decimal mark; this no longer happens.

  • Amounts could display with a different precision if the journal included a timedot file; this no longer happens.

  • Costs in balance assertions were not displayed with standard styles like other amounts; now they are.

  • Zero amounts were always shown as just "0"; now they are shown with their original commodity symbol and style. (And if an inferred amount has multiple zeros in different commodities, a posting is displayed for each of these.)

• print no longer displays numbers with a single digit group mark and no decimal mark, which are ambiguous and hard to re-parse. Now if a number has digit group marks the decimal mark will always be shown also. Eg 1,000 (where the comma is a thousands separator) is now shown as 1,000..

• The check command's balancedwithautoconversion and balancednoautoconversion checks have been renamed to autobalanced and balanced.

• hledger check recentassertions now reports failures at the first posting that's more than 7 days later than the latest balance assertion (rather than at the balance assertion). This is the thing actually triggering the error, and it is more likely to be visible or at least closer when you are working at the end of a journal file.

  Also, the suggested sample balance assertion now uses the same commodity symbol as in the failing posting (the first, if there are more than one); and, no longer includes a cleared mark.

• The import command now shows the file path being imported to.

• With --pivot, desc is now the preferred spelling for pivoting on description.

• The demo command now ignores an invalid journal file, like the other HELP commands.

• Debug output for equity conversion postings has been improved, making troubleshooting easier.

• Allow aeson 2.2, megaparsec 9.5.

Fixes

• In journal files, valid multicommodity transactions where the matching non-equity postings can't be auto-detected are no longer considered an error (as they were in hledger 1.29 and 1.30). Now, such transactions are accepted, and --infer-cost has no effect on them. This is similar to the behaviour of --cost, --infer-equity, and --infer-market-prices. (#2045)

• In journal files, equity conversion postings are now detected more tolerantly, using the same precision as the conversion posting's amount (#2041). Eg, the following transaction is now accepted:

  2023-01-01
      Assets               -84.01 USD @ 2.495 GEL
        ; ^ 209.60495 GEL, recognised as a match for the 209.60 below
      Equity:Conversion     84.01 USD
      Equity:Conversion   -209.60 GEL
      Assets               209.60 GEL
  

• The roi command now reports TWR per period and overall TWR for multi-period reports. (#2068, Dmitry Astapov)

• The commands list no longer shows bar when hledger-bar is not installed (#2065), and had a few other cleanups.

1.30.1 2023-06-02

Fixes

• Add missing files to Hackage release, making it buildable.

Docs

• Replace note about repeated options.

1.30 2023-06-01

Breaking changes

• The CSV reader now properly skips all empty lines, as specified by docs. Previously, inner empty lines were not being skipped automatically. You might need to adjust the skip count in some CSV rules files. (#2024)

• Timedot format now generates a single multi-posting transaction per date line, and supports comments and tags on all lines. (#1754)

• Timeclock format now supports comments and tags. Descriptions can no longer contain semicolons. (#1220)

Features

• CSV rules files can now be read directly, as in hledger -f foo.csv.rules CMD. By default this will read data from foo.csv in the same directory.

• CSV rules files can use a new source FILE rule to specify the data file, with some convenience features:

  • If the data file does not exist, it is treated as empty, not an error.

  • If FILE is a relative path, it is relative to the rules file's directory. If it is just a file name with no path, it is relative to ~/Downloads/.

  • If FILE is a glob pattern, the most recently modified matched file is used.

  This helps remove some of the busywork of managing CSV downloads. Most of your financial institutions's default CSV filenames are different and can be recognised by a glob pattern. So you can put a rule like source Checking1*.csv in foo-checking.csv.rules, periodically download CSV from Foo's website accepting your browser's defaults, and then run hledger import checking.csv.rules to import any new transactions. The next time, if you have done no cleanup, your browser will probably save it as something like Checking1-2.csv, and hledger will still see that because of the * wild card. You can choose whether to delete CSVs after import, or keep them for a while as temporary backups, or archive them somewhere. (Experimental)

• The balance command has a new --count report type which reports posting counts instead of amounts.

• Full boolean queries, allowing arbitrary use of AND, OR, NOT (case insensitive) and parentheses for grouping, are now supported. For backward compatibility, these require an expr: prefix. Existing queries work as before, and you can mix and match the old and new styles if you like. (Chris Lemaire)

• demo: This new command plays brief asciinema screencasts explaining various features and use cases. We will add more of these over time. (Experimental)

Improvements

• Add-on commands can now have .js, .lua, or .php file extensions.

• Generated and modified transactions and postings have the same hidden tags (beginning with underscore) as before, but no longer have visible tags added by default. Use --verbose-tags if you want them added.

• We now try harder to ensure less (and its more mode) show our ANSI formatting properly in help output. If you use some other $PAGER, you may have to configure it yourself to show ANSI (or disable ANSI entirely, eg by setting NO_COLOR=1). This is now documented in hledger manual > Paging. (#2015)

• The print command's --match mode has been refined. Previously, similarity completely outweighed recency, so a slightly-more-similar transaction would always be selected no matter how old it was. Now similarity and recency are more balanced, and it should produce the desired transaction more often. There is also new debug output (at debug level 1) for troubleshooting.

• Miscellaneous commands list updates. Help has been added for all published add-on commands (like hledger-lots).

• The help command's documentation now mentions an issue caused by a too-old info program, as on mac. (#1770)

Fixes

• Unbalanced virtual postings with no amount always infer a zero amount. This is fixing and clarifying the status quo; they always did this, but print always showed them with no amount, even with -x, and the behaviour was undocumented.

• On windows systems with multiple drive letters, the commands list could fail to show all installed add-ons. (#2040)

• Balancing a transaction with a balance assignment now properly respects costs. (#2039)

• The commands list no longer lists non-installed addons. (#2034)

• Since hledger 1.25, "every Nth day of month" period rules with N > 28 could be calculated wrongly by a couple of days when given certain forecast start dates. Eg ~ every 31st day of month with --forecast='2023-03-30..'. This is now fixed. (#2032)

• Postings are now processed in correct date order when inferring balance assignments. (#2025)

• Posting comment lines no longer disrupt the underline position in error messages. (#1927)

• Debug output is now formatted to fit the terminal width.

Docs

• Miscellaneous manual cleanups.

• Rewrite introductory sections, Date adjustment, Directives, Forecasting, etc.

• Add Paging section.

• Remove archaic mentions of setenv.

API

• Renamed: Hledger.Cli.Commands: findCommand -> findBuiltinCommand

1.29.2 2023-04-07

Breaking changes

• 1.29's cleanup of the close command has been continued. Here are all the changes to close since hledger 1.28:

  • The default behaviour is now to print only one transaction: a closing transaction.

  • To print both closing and opening transactions as before, use the new --migrate flag.

  • The accounts closed by default are now just the ALE accounts (accounts declared or inferred as type Asset, Liability, or Equity). If you don't have account types configured, or to close some other set of accounts, provide query arguments that match them. To close all accounts as before, use a . argument to match them all.

  • To print a retain earnings transaction for RX accounts (accounts of type Revenue or Expense), use the new --retain flag.

  • The equity command alias, removed in 1.29, has been restored.

  • The --open-acct option, removed in 1.29, has been restored.

  • The --closing and --opening flags have been renamed to --close and --open. (--close had been removed in 1.29 and is now restored.)

  • The docs have been rewritten. Also the 1.29 release notes now mention the breaking change.

  • The command is marked experimental again.

  (#2020)

Fixes

• type: queries now "see through" account aliases and pivots, as they did in hledger <1.27, and as acct: queries do. (#2018)

• The corruption in 1.29's info manual is fixed. (#2023)

• The 1.29 release notes for periodic reports'/periodic transactions' start dates have been improved. Also the hledger manual's "Date adjustment" section has been corrected and clarified.

1.29.1 2023-03-16

Improvements

• Hledger.Cli.Script now also exports

   Control.Applicative
   Control.Concurrent
   Data.Char
   Data.Functor
   System.IO
   System.IO.Error
  

  and new string helpers

   strip1Char
   stripBy
   strip1By
  

• Allow building with GHC 9.6.1 (#2011)

Fixes

• The stats report no longer displays "Exact" in front of dates. (#2012)

Docs

• remove duplicate in hledger close docs (Yehoshua Pesach Wallach)

1.29 2023-03-11

Breaking changes

• Periodic reports will now start exactly at the start date you have specified, rather than being adjusted to a natural period boundary; see below.

• The close command's CLI and default behaviour was changed; see below (and fixes in hledger 1.29.2+).

Features

• Periodic transactions and periodic reports can now start on any date. Eg, hledger reg -M -b 1/15 now starts exactly on jan 15th, and a periodic rule like ~ monthly from 2023-01-15 now works as you'd expect instead of raising an error. This also improves our ability to read Ledger files. Inferred start/end dates, eg obtained from the journal instead of the command line, are still automatically adjusted to period boundaries, as before.

  Upgrade notes: in report commands which specify a start date, you might need to adjust that date to see the same periods as before. Eg:

  • -p 'weekly from 202304' (equivalent to -p 'weekly from 20230401') now gives periods like 2023-04-01..2023-04-07. Change it to start on a monday (eg -p 'weekly from 20230403) to restore simple week periods like 2023-04-03W14.

  • -M -b 2023/1/15 now gives periods like 2023-01-15..2023-02-14 2023-02-15..2023-03-14. Change it to start on a first of month (eg -M -b 2023/1) to restore simple month periods like Jan Feb Mar.

  (#1982)

• You can now freely combine @/@@ notation and conversion postings in a single transaction. This can help readability, and also allows more flexibility when recording cost. hledger will check that the two notations are in agreement, and ignore the redundancy if they are. (Conversion postings are postings to accounts with type V/Conversion or name equity:conversion/equity:trade/equity:trading, or subaccounts of these. See also COST.)

• In journal format there is now a tag directive for declaring tag names, and the check command now has a tags check to enforce use of declared tag names.

Improvements

• hledger's commands list has been reorganised for clarity. More add-on commands are now recognised and categorised, and unrecognised add-on commands are listed in a more compact multi-column layout. (Simon Michael, Michael Grünewald)

• hledger's commands list and command line help now use ANSI (bold headings) when supported.

• hledger's commands list and command line help now use a pager (respecting $PAGER) for long output except on MS Windows.

• hledger's --version output no longer shows + for dev builds made in dirty repos (it was buggy).

• The add command's Description completions now also include payee names (declared with payee or recorded in transactions with |), not just full descriptions.

• aregister now supports HTML output. (#1996) (Jonathan Dowland)

• aregister now shows a " (matching query)" hint in report title when extra query args (other than date: or depth:) are used, to reduce confusion.

• The close command's CLI and default behaviour were changed, attempting to make it easier to understand and use. Some of its legacy flags and aliases were also dropped, without sufficient warning. For the full details, including subsequent cleanups, see hledger 1.29.2's change notes.

• register-match is now the --match mode of the register command. (This command was used by ledger-autosync at one point; if you still need it, hopefully register --match works similarly.)

• print-unique has been dropped, because it doesn't support print's options, it disorders same-day transactions, I don't know of any users or use cases, and it could easily be recreated as an addon script.

• print's JSON output now also includes source positions for --forecast transactions. (Chris Lemaire)

• Journal format now allows the empty commodity symbol to be written as "", so it's now possible to declare market prices for it: P 2022-01-01 "" $100. This can be useful for timedot data.

• Inferring costs from equity now happens after transaction balancing, not before. As a result, --infer-costs now works in transactions where an amount is left blank.

• account declarations now reject parenthesised account names, reducing confusion. (Chris Lemaire)

• Our journal reader now accepts more Ledger syntax, improving Ledger file compatibility (#1962). We now test our ability to at least read the sample journals from Ledger's baseline functional tests, and our success rate has improved from 80% to 90% since 1.28.

  • since is accepted as synonym of from in period expressions
  • apply year and year are accepted as synonyms of Y
  • (lot notes) in amounts and ((valuation expressions)) after amounts are now ignored
  • directives A, assert, bucket, capture, check, define, expr, eval, python, value, apply fixed, apply tag, end apply fixed, end apply tag, end apply year are now ignored
  • subdirectives of payee, tag, and commodity (other than format) are now ignored
  • pop directive is no longer supported

• When reading CSV, we now check that assigned account names are valid (parseable). (#1978)

Fixes

• aregister now handles an extra account query correctly. (#2007)

• balance's --help now mentions --layout=tidy

• Balance commands with --layout=bare now generate proper table layout in HTML output.

• register's -w/--width option no longer gives ugly parse error messages.

• stats's --help no longer wrongly claims to support -O/--output-format.

• Balance assignments with a cost now generate a correct balance assertion. (#1965)

• The CSV reader now properly skips header lines before attempting to parse records. (#1967)

Scripts/addons

• Scripts can now use Hledger.Cli.Script, a convenient new prelude which helps reduce import boilerplate. It currently re-exports:

  Control.Monad
  Data.Either
  Data.List
  Data.Maybe
  Data.Ord
  Data.Time
  Text.Printf hiding (formatString)
  Data.Text (Text, pack, unpack)
  Safe hiding (at)
  System.Directory
  System.Environment
  System.Exit
  System.FilePath
  System.Process
  Hledger
  Hledger.Cli
  Hledger.Cli.Main (argsToCliOpts)
  

  (Not much of Data.Text/Data.Text.IO because those need to be qualified.)

Docs

• chunk the hledger manual into parts, rename and rearrange sections for better structure/flow
• add a cheatsheet demonstrating all the main journal features that I recommend
• move a number of my not-so-recommended journal features into a less visible "Other syntax" section
• add: payees/descriptions completion
• areg: more advice on account-matching
• bal: --budget: clarify use of print --forecast
• bal: budget: compare with forecasting; add some tips
• balance cleanups/reorder
• check: adjacentconversionpostings was dropped
• cli: balance: fix link to Budgeting page
• cli: fix all links to Journal > Tags / Commands > tags
• codes: improve example suggested by Rob Nielsen
• csv, timeclock, timedot: clarify comment lines (#1953)
• csv: add new coinbase example
• csv: clarify amount-in/amount-out docs (#1970)
• csv: clarify skip/valid csv semantics (#1967)
• csv: clarify valid CSV requirements and issues (fix #1966)
• csv: cleanup, reorder, CSV rules tips -> Working with CSV
• csv: fix wrong if tables doc; rewrite several sections (#1977)
• csv: flatten, clean up CSV sections
• csv: improve Amount field / Setting amounts
• csv: note -in and -out are used together for one posting (#1970)
• csv: rules factoring tips
• csv: try to clarify how CSV fields and hledger fields work
• document --infer-market-prices with signed costs (#1870)
• fix duplicate market prices heading breaking info navigation
• import: note a pitfall with multifile import
• improve Directives summaries
• introduction/input/output improvements
• journal: cheatsheet: clarify date tag
• journal: rewrite Account names, mention brackets/parentheses (#1915)
• mention pivoting on a tag with multiple values (#1950)
• more cost notation docs; describe Ledger and Beancount cost notation
• more mention of posting order effect on inferring cost (#1959)
• period expressions doc updates
• Removed redundant paragraph in documentation. (J. B. Rainsberger)
• rename directive sections, fix many links
• reorganise commands list, like the CLI
• reorganise bin/README & the Scripts page, add entries for recent scripts
• replace "transaction prices" terminology with "costs"
• tags: discuss multi-values/overriding (#1950)
• update market price inference docs per sol
• Updated section on pivoting. Used synonyms for "member" in cases where there could be confusion with the tag named "member." (Robert Nielsen)
• use more standard and consistent boilerplate in hledger, ui, web man pages
• virtual postings: improve wording per Robert Nielsen

1.28 2022-12-01

Features

• The accounts command has new flags: --undeclared (show accounts used but not declared), --unused (show accounts declared but not used), and --find (find the first account matched by the first command argument, a convenience for scripts). Also -u and -d short flags have been added for --used and --declared.

• A new CSV rule intra-day-reversed helps generate transactions in correct order with CSVs where records are reversed within each day.

• CSV rules can now correctly convert CSV date-times with a implicit or explicit timezone to dates in your local timezone. Previously, CSV date-times with a different time zone from yours could convert to off-by-one dates, because the CSV's timezone was ignored. Now,

  1. When a CSV has date-times with an implicit timezone different from yours, you can use the timezone rule to declare it.

  2. CSV date-times with a known timezone (either declared by timezone or parsed with %Z) will be localised to the system timezone (or to the timezone set with the TZ environment variable).

  (#1936)

Improvements

• print --match now respects -o and -O.

• print --match now returns a non-zero exit code when there is no acceptable match.

• Support megaparsec 9.3. (Felix Yan)

• Support GHC 9.4.

Fixes

• In CSV rules, when assigning a parenthesised account name to accountN, extra whitespace is now ignored, allowing unbalanced postings to be detected correctly.

Scripts/addons

• bin/hledger-move helps record transfers involving subaccounts and costs, eg when withdrawing some or all of an investment balance containing many lots and costs.

• bin/hledger-git no longer uses the non-existent git record command. (#1942) (Patrick Fiaux)

• bin/watchaccounts is a small shell script for watching the account tree as you make changes.

1.27.1 2022-09-18

Fixes

• Balance commands using -T -O html no longer fail with an error when there is no data to report. (#1933)

1.27 2022-09-01

Features

• hledger check recentassertions (and flycheck-hledger in Emacs if you enable this check) requires that all balance-asserted accounts have a balance assertion within 7 days before their latest posting.

  This helps remind you to not only record transactions, but also to regularly check account balances against the real world, to catch errors sooner and avoid a time-consuming hunt.

• The --infer-costs general flag has been added, as the inverse operation to --infer-equity. --infer-costs detects commodity conversion transactions which have been written with equity conversion postings (the traditional accounting notation) and adds PTA cost notation (@@) to them (allowing cost reporting). See https://hledger.org/hledger.html#equity-conversion-postings . (Stephen Morgan)

Improvements

• Many error messages have been improved. Most error messages now use a consistent, more informative format. (#1436)

• The accounts command has a new --directives flag which makes it show valid account directives which you can paste into a journal.

• The accounts command has a new --positions flag which shows where accounts were declared, useful for troubleshooting. (#1909)

• Bump lower bounds for Diff and githash. (Andrew Lelechenko)

• GHC 8.6 and 8.8 are no longer supported. Building hledger now requires GHC 8.10 or greater.

Fixes

• Account display order is now calculated correctly even when accounts are declared in multiple files. (#1909)

• At --debug 5 and up, account declarations info is logged. (#1909)

• hledger aregister and hledger-ui now show transactions correctly when there is a type: query. (#1905)

• bal: Allow cumulative gain and valuechange reports. Previously, --cumulative with --gain or --valuechange would produce an empty report. This fixes this issue to produce a reasonable report. (Stephen Morgan)

• bal: budget goal amounts now respect -c styles (fixes #1907)

• bal: budget goals now respect -H (#1879)

• bal: budget goals were ignoring rule-specified start date

• cf/bs/is: Fixed non-display of child accounts when there is an intervening account of another type. (#1921) (Stephen Morgan)

• roi: make sure empty cashflows are skipped when determining first cashflow (Charlotte Van Petegem) Empty cashflows are added when the begin date of the report is before the first transaction.

Scripts/addons

• https://hledger.org/scripts.html - an overview of scripts and addons in bin/.

• paypaljson, paypaljson2csv - download txns from paypal API

• hledger-check-postable.hs - check that no postings are made to accounts with a postable:(n|no) tag

• hledger-addon-example.hs - script template

1.26.1 2022-07-11

• require safe 0.3.19+ to avoid deprecation warning

1.26 2022-06-04

Improvements

• register and aregister have been made faster, by

  • considering only the first 1000 items for choosing column widths. You can restore the old behaviour (guaranteed alignment across all items) with the new --align-all flag. (#1839, Stephen Morgan)

  • discarding cost data more aggressively, giving big speedups for large journals with many costs. (#1828, Stephen Morgan)

• Most error messages from the journal reader and the check command now use a consistent layout, with an "Error:" prefix, line and column numbers, and an excerpt highlighting the problem. Work in progress. (#1436) (Simon Michael, Stephen Morgan)

• hledger check ordereddates now always checks all transactions (previously it could be restricted by query arguments).

• The --pivot option now supports a status argument, to pivot on transaction status.

• Update bash completions (Jakob Schöttl)

Fixes

• Value reports with --date2 and a report interval (like hledger bal -VM --date2) were failing with a "expected all spans to have an end date" error since 1.22; this is now fixed. (#1851, Stephen Morgan)

• In CSV rules, interpolation of a non-existent field like %999 or %nosuchfield is now ignored (previously it inserted that literal text). Note this means such an error will not be reported; Simon chose this as the more convenient behaviour when converting CSV. Experimental. (#1803, #1814) (Stephen Morgan)

• --infer-market-price was inferring a negative price when selling. (#1813, Stephen Morgan)

• Allow an escaped forward slash in regular expression account aliases. (#982, Stephen Morgan)

• The tags command now also lists tags from unused account declarations. It also has improved command-line help layout. (#1857)

• hledger accounts now shows its debug output at a more appropriate level (4).

1.25 2022-03-04

Breaking changes

• Journal format's account NAME TYPECODE syntax, deprecated in 1.13, has been dropped. Please use account NAME ; type:TYPECODE instead. (Stephen Morgan)

• The rule for auto-detecting "cash" (liquid asset) accounts in the cashflow report
  has changed: it's now "all accounts under a top-level asset account, with cash, bank, checking or saving in their name" (case insensitive, variations allowed).
  So if you see a change in your cashflow reports, you might need to add account directives with type:C tags, declaring your top-most cash accounts.

Features

• The new type:TYPECODES query matches accounts by their accounting type. Account types are declared with a type: tag in account directives, or inferred from common english account names, or inherited from parent accounts, as described at [Declaring accounts > Account types]. This generalises the account type detection of balancesheet, incomestatement etc., so you can now select accounts by type without needing fragile account name regexps. Also, the accounts command has a new --types flag to show account types. Eg:

  hledger bal type:AL  # balance report showing assets and liabilities
  hledger reg type:x   # register of all expenses
  hledger acc --types  # list accounts and their types
  

  (#1820, #1822) (Simon Michael, Stephen Morgan)

• The tag: query can now also match account tags, as defined in account directives. Subaccounts inherit tags from their parents. Accounts, postings and transactions can be filtered by account tag. (#1817)

• The new --infer-equity flag replaces the @/@@ price notation in commodity conversion transactions with more correct equity postings (when not using -B/--cost). This makes these transactions fully balanced, and preserves the accounting equation. For example:

  2000-01-01
    a             1 AAA @@ 2 BBB
    b            -2 BBB
  
  $ hledger print --infer-equity
  2000-01-01
    a                               1 AAA
    equity:conversion:AAA-BBB:AAA  -1 AAA
    equity:conversion:AAA-BBB:BBB   2 BBB
    b                              -2 BBB
  

  equity:conversion is the account used by default. To use a different account, declare it with an account directive and the new V (Conversion) account type. Eg:

  account Equity:Trading    ; type:V
  

  (#1554) (Stephen Morgan, Simon Michael)

• Balance commands (bal, bs etc.) can now generate easy-to-process "tidy" CSV data with -O csv --layout tidy. In tidy data, every variable is a column and each row represents a single data point (cf https://vita.had.co.nz/papers/tidy-data.html). (#1768, #1773, #1775) (Stephen Morgan)

Improvements

• Strict mode (-s/--strict) now also checks periodic transactions (--forecast) and auto postings (--auto). (#1810) (Stephen Morgan)

• hledger check commodities now always accepts zero amounts which have no commodity symbol. (#1767) (Stephen Morgan)

• Relative smart dates may now specify an arbitrary number of some period into the future or past). Some examples:

  • in 5 days
  • in -6 months
  • 5 weeks ahead
  • 2 quarters ago

  (Stephen Morgan)

• CSV output now always disables digit group marks (eg, thousands separators), making it more machine readable by default. (#1771) (Stephen Morgan)

• Unicode may now be used in field names/references in CSV rules files. (#1809) (Stephen Morgan)

• Error messages improved:

  • Balance assignments
  • aregister
  • Command line parsing (less "user error")

Fixes

• --layout=bare no longer shows a commodity symbol for zero amounts. (#1789) (Stephen Morgan)

• balance --budget no longer elides boring parents of unbudgeted accounts if they have a budget. (#1800) (Stephen Morgan)

• roi now reports TWR correctly

  • when there are several PnL changes occurring on a single day
  • and also when investment is fully sold/withdrawn/discounted at the end of a particular reporting period.

  (#1791) (Dmitry Astapov)

Documentation

• There is a new CONVERSION & COST section, replacing COSTING. (#1554)

• Some problematic interactions of account aliases with other features have been noted. (#1788)

• Updated: Declaring accounts > Account types

1.24.1 2021-12-10

Fixes

• balance --declared is now filtered correctly by a not:ACCT query. (#1783)

• More reliable --version output, with commit date and without patch level.

API changes:

• new type synonyms ProgramName, PackageVersion, VersionString
• versionStringForProgname -> versionString with extra argument
• versionStringFor -> versionStringWith with extra argument

1.24 2021-12-01

Features

• balance commands provide more control over how multicommodity amounts are displayed. (And they no longer elide too-wide amounts by default.) The --commodity-column flag has been deprecated and replaced by a new --layout option, with three values:

  • wide (the default, shows amounts on one line unelided, like older hledger versions)
  • tall (a new display mode, shows one amount per line)
  • bare (like the old --commodity-columm, shows one commodity per line with symbols in their own column)

  (Stephen Morgan)

• The balance commands have a new --declared flag, causing them to include leaf (ie, non-parent) accounts declared by account directives, even if they contain no transactions yet. Together with -E, this shows a balance for both used and declared accounts. The idea is to be able to see a useful "complete" balance report, even when you don't have transactions in all of your declared accounts yet. (#1765)

• journal files now support a decimal-mark directive as a more principled way (than commodity directives) to specify the decimal character in use in that file, to ensure accurate number parsing. (#1670, Lawrence Wu)

Improvements

• The stats command now shows rough but useful performance stats: run time and processing speed in transactions per second.

• balance: support the --related flag, like register, showing the other postings from the transactions. (#1469, Stephen Morgan)

• roi now uses posting dates when available, and honors the --date2 flag. This will not change the results computed for the typical use-case, it just makes "roi" more thorough/consistent. (Dmitry Astapov)

• aregister now shows transactions' secondary date if the --date2 flag is used. (#1731)

• timedot: a D default commodity (and style) declared in a parent journal file will now be applied to timedot amounts. This means they can be priced and valued/converted.

• cli: The --pretty and --forecast options can now be written after the command name, like other general options. (Stephen Morgan)

• register -V -H with no interval now values at report end date, like balance. (#1718, Stephen Morgan)

• Allow megaparsec 9.2.

• Drop the base-compat-batteries dependency. (Stephen Morgan)

Fixes

• prices: Do not include zero amounts when calculating amounts for balance assignments. (#1736) (Stephen Morgan) This is not usually a problem, but can get in the way of auto-inferring prices.

• csv: Successfully parse an empty csv file. (#1183) (Stephen Morgan)

• balance: Balance reports with --depth=0 properly report aggregated values, not zero everywhere. (#1761) (Stephen Morgan)

• prices: Do not try to generate prices when there would be a zero denominator. Also correctly generate reverse prices for zero amounts. (Stephen Morgan)

• csv: Allow both amount-in and amount-out fields to contain a zero. (#1733, Stephen Morgan)

• balance: Balance reports should consider date: queries when calculating report span with --date2. (#1745, Stephen Morgan)

• print: auto: The print command should always display inferred amounts for --auto generated postings. (#1276, Stephen Morgan)

1.23 2021-09-21

Features

• The balance command has a new --gain report type, showing unrealised capital gains/losses. Essentially, this is the difference between the amounts' costs and their total present value. More precisely, between the value of the amounts' costs and the value of the amounts on the valuation date(s). (Ie, you can report gain in a different currency.) (#1623, #1432, Stephen Morgan, Charlotte Van Petegem)

• The new -c/--commodity-style option makes it easy to override commodity display styles at runtime, eg to adjust the number of decimal places or change the position of the symbol. (#1593, Arjen Langebaerd)

• The balance commands have a new --commodity-column flag that displays commodity symbols in a dedicated column, showing one line per commodity and all amounts as bare numbers. (#1559, #1626, #1654, Lawrence Wu, Simon Michael, Stephen Morgan)

• The balance --budget option can now take an argument, a case insensitive description substring which selects a subset of the journal's periodic transactions for setting budget goals. This makes it possible to keep multiple named budgets in one journal, and select the one you want with --budget's argument. (#1612)

• Period expressions now support every weekday, every weekendday and every mon,wed,... (multiple days of the week). This is intended for periodic transaction rules used with --forecast (or bal --budget). (#1632, Lawrence Wu)

• The new --today=DATE option allows overriding today's date. This can be useful in tests and examples using relative dates, to make them reproducible. (#1674, Stephen Morgan)

• In CSV rules, multi-line comments are now supported. Newlines in CSV data are preserved, or newlines can be added by writing \n when assigning to comment, comment1 etc. (Malte Brandy)

Improvements

• Incremental performance improvements; hledger 1.23 is the fastest hledger yet, about 10% faster than 1.22. (Stephen Morgan)

• register no longer slows down when there are many report intervals. (#1683, Stephen Morgan)

• Numbers in SQL output now always use decimal period (.), independent of commodity display styles. (Stephen Morgan)

• --sort now gives a more intuitive sort oder when there are multiple commodities. Negative numbers in one commodity are always less than positive numbers in another commodity. (#1563, Stephen Morgan)

• --infer-market-price has been renamed to --infer-market-prices. (The old spelling still works, since we accept flag prefixes.)

• Our pretty-printed JSON now orders object attributes alphabetically, across all GHC and haskell lib versions.

• register with a report interval starting on custom dates (eg: `hledger reg -p "every 15th day of month") now makes the date column wide enough to show the start and end dates. It also wastes less whitespace after the column. (#1655, Stephen Morgan)

• The --forecast option will now reject a report interval in its argument, instead of silently ignoring it.

• In JSON output, object attributes are now ordered alphabetically, consistently for all GHC and haskell lib versions. (#1618, Stephen Morgan)

• JSON output now indents with 2 spaces rather than 4. (Stephen Morgan)

• The balance commands' -S/--sort-amount flag now behaves more predictably and intuitively with multiple commodities. Multi-commodity amounts are sorted by comparing their amounts in each commodity, with alphabetically-first commodity symbols being most significant, and assuming zero with alphabetically-first commodity symbols being most significant, and assuming zero when a commodity is missing. (#1563, #1564, Stephen Morgan)

• The close command now uses the later of today or journal's last day as default closing date, providing more intuitive behaviour when closing a journal with future transactions. Docs have been improved. (#1604)

• Rules for selecting the forecast period (within with --forecast generates transactions) have been tweaked slightly, and some disagreement between docs and implementation has been fixed. Now, the forecast period begins on:

  • the start date supplied to the --forecast argument, if any
  • otherwise, the later of
    • the report start date if specified with -b/-p/date:
    • the day after the latest normal (non-periodic) transaction in the journal, if any
  • otherwise today.

  It ends on:

  • the end date supplied to the --forecast argument, if any
  • otherwise the report end date if specified with -e/-p/date:
  • otherwise 180 days (6 months) from today.

  This is more intuitive in some cases. (Eg: hledger reg --forecast -b 2020-01-01 on a journal containing only periodic transaction rules now shows forecast transactions starting from 2020-01-01, rather than from today.) (#1648, #1665, #1667, Stephen Morgan, Simon Michael)

• Require base >=4.11, prevent red squares on Hackage's build matrix. (We officially support GHC 8.6+, which means base 4.12, but Hackage shows all packages building successfully with base 4.11/GHC 8.4+ somehow, so it's still allowed..)

Fixes

• A rare bug causing incorrect balances to be reported by the cf/bs/bse/is commands, since hledger 1.19, has been fixed. (cf/bs/bse/is with --tree --no-elide --begin DATE and certain account directives could show wrong balances). (#1698, Stephen Morgan)

• aregister now aligns multicommodity amounts properly (broken since 1.21). (#1656, Stephen Morgan)

• balance -E (and hledger-ui Z) now correctly show zero parent accounts, fixing a bug introduced in hledger 1.19. (#1688, Stephen Morgan)

• The roi command no longer gives an ugly error in a certain case with PnL applied on the first day of investment. (Dmitry Astapov)

• --forecast now generates transactions up to the day before the specified report end date (instead of two days before). (#1633, Stephen Morgan)

• Certain errors in CSV conversion, such as a failing balance assertion, were always being reported as line 2.

1.22.2 2021-08-07

Breaking changes

• aregister no longer hides future transactions by default. This is a consequence of the fix for #1638. It makes aregister consistent, so we think it's a reasonable change. So if you have future-dated transactions in your journal which you don't want reported, you now must exclude them with -e tomorrow or date:-tomorrow in the command, as with other reports. (Stephen Morgan)

Improvements

• Timedot format's doc has been rewritten.

Fixes

• Make balance assignments in forecasted transactions work again (broken in 1.22.1). Forecast transactions are now generated early and processed in the same way as other transactions. (#1638, Stephen Morgan)

• aregister preserves the order of same-day transactions again (broken in 1.22.1). (#1642, Stephen Morgan)

1.22.1 2021-08-02

Improvements

• Bash shell completions (for hledger, hledger-ui, hledger-web) are now included in the hledger package's release tarballs, making them more likely to be installed by system packages. (Jakob Schöttl)

• roi docs now discuss how to quote multi-word queries. (#1609, Dmitry Astapov)

• Allow megaparsec 9.1

Fixes

• cur: and amt: queries now match the original amounts before valuation and cost conversion, as they did before hledger 1.22. We believe this is the more useful behaviour in practice. (#1625) (Stephen Morgan)

• Queries now work better with register --related, no longer showing duplicate postings when more than one posting in a transaction is matched. (#1629) (Stephen Morgan)

• Valuation now works with register --related. (#1630) (Stephen Morgan)

• Auto posting rules now also see inferred amounts, not just explicit amounts. (#1412) (Stephen Morgan)

• Our info manuals now have more robust directory metadata (no subdirectory path), making them more likely to be linked in your top-level Info directory by system packages. (#1594) (Simon Michael, Damien Cassou)

• The error message for a non-existent input file no longer shows excess double quotes. (#1601, Stephen Morgan)

• Journal format docs: The commodity directive's scope is now correctly described (lasts until end of current file).

• The aregister command now properly ignores a depth: argument. It might now also behave more correctly with valuation or --txn-dates. (#1634, Stephen Morgan)

1.22 2021-07-03

Features

• check: A new balancednoautoconversion check requires transactions to balance without the use of inferred transaction prices. (Explicit transaction prices are allowed.) This check is included in --strict mode. The old autobalanced check has been renamed to balancedwithautoconversion. (Stephen Morgan)

Improvements

• Many internal optimisations have been applied (cf hledger-lib changelog). Overall, you can expect most reports to be about 20% faster. The register report is more than 2x faster and uses 4x less memory. (Stephen Morgan)

  ~/src/hledger$ quickbench -w hledger-1.21,hledger
  Running 5 tests 1 times with 2 executables at 2021-06-29 13:13:26 HST:
  
  Best times:
  +----------------------------------------------------++--------------+---------+
  |                                                    || hledger-1.21 | hledger |
  +====================================================++==============+=========+
  | -f examples/10000x1000x10.journal print            ||         1.18 |    0.90 |
  | -f examples/10000x1000x10.journal register         ||        12.82 |    5.95 |
  | -f examples/10000x1000x10.journal balance          ||         1.38 |    0.86 |
  | -f examples/1000x1000x10.journal balance --weekly  ||         0.96 |    0.78 |
  | -f examples/10000x1000x10.journal balance --weekly ||        13.07 |   10.79 |
  +----------------------------------------------------++--------------+---------+
  

• ANSI color is now disabled automatically (on stdout) when the -o/--output-file option is used (with a value other than -). (#1533)

• ANSI color is now also available in debug output, determined in the usual way by --color, NO_COLOR, and whether the output (stderr) is interactive.

• The --version flag shows more details of the build, when known: git tag, number of commits since the tag, commit hash, platform and architecture. (Stephen Morgan)

• balance: Capitalisation of "account" and "total" (and lack of a colon in the latter) in CSV output is now consistent for single- and multi-period reports.

• balance reports' CSV output now includes full account names. (#1566) (Stephen Morgan)

• csv: We now accept spaces when parsing amounts from CSV. (Eric Mertens)

• json: Avoid adding unnecessary decimal places in JSON output. (Don't increase them all to 10 decimal places.) (Stephen Morgan)

• json: Simplify amount precision (asprecision) in JSON output. It is now just the number of decimal places, rather than an object. (Stephen Morgan)

• GHC 9.0 is now officially supported, and GHC 8.0, 8.2, 8.4 are not; building hledger now requires GHC 8.6 or greater.

• Added a now-required lower bound on containers. (#1514)

Fixes

• Auto posting rules now match postings more precisely, respecting cur: and amt: queries. (#1582) (Stephen Morgan)

• balance reports: Fix empty cells when amounts are too wide to fit (broken since 1.20) (#1526). (Stephen Morgan)

• csv: Fix the escaping of double quotes in CSV output (broken in 1.21). (Stephen Morgan)

• register: Fix the running total when there is a report interval (broken since 1.19) (#1568). (Stephen Morgan)

• stats: No longer gets confused by posting dates. (#772) (Stephen Morgan)

• timeclock: hledger print shows timeclock amounts with just 2 decimal places again (broken in 1.21). (#1527)

• When all transaction amounts have the same sign, the error message no longer adds an inferred price. (#1551) (Stephen Morgan)

• Cleaned up some references to old man pages. (Felix Yan)

1.21 2021-03-10

general

• hledger is now generally about 10% more memory- and time-efficient, and significantly more so in certain cases, eg journals with many total transaction prices. (Stephen Morgan)

• The --help/-h and --version flags are no longer position-sensitive; if there is a command argument, they now always refer to the command (where applicable).

• The new --info flag opens the hledger info manual, if "info" is in $PATH. hledger COMMAND --info will open COMMAND's info node.

• The --man flag opens the hledger man page, if "man" is in $PATH. hledger COMMAND --man will scroll the page to CMD's section, if "less" is in $PATH. (We force the use of "less" in this case, overriding any $PAGER or $MAN_PAGER setting.)

• Some command aliases, considered deprecated, have been removed: txns, equity, and the single-letter command aliases a, b, p, and r. This was discussed at https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/pull/1423 and on the hledger mail list. It might annoy some folks; please read the issue and do follow up there if needed.

• Notable documentation updates: the separate file format manuals have been merged into the hledger manual, the topic hierarchy has been simplified, the balance command docs and "commands" section have been rewritten.

valuation

• Costing and valuation are now independent, and can be combined. --value=cost and --value=cost,COMM are still supported (equivalent to --cost and --cost --value=then,COMM respectively), but deprecated. (Stephen Morgan)

• -V is now always equivalent to --value=end. (Stephen Morgan)

• --value=end now includes market price directives as well as transactions when choosing a valuation date for single-period reports. (#1405, Stephen Morgan)

• --value=end now picks a consistent valuation date for single- and and multi-period reports. (#1424, Stephen Morgan)

• --value=then is now supported with all reports, not just register. (Stephen Morgan)

• The too-vague --infer-value flag has been renamed to --infer-market-price. Tip: typing --infer-market or even --infer is sufficient. The old spelling still works, but is now deprecated.

commands

• add: Infix matches are now scored higher. If the search pattern occurs in full within the other description, that match gets a +0.5 score boost.

• add: --debug now shows transaction matching results, useful when troubleshooting.

• balance: To accomodate new report types, the --change|--cumulative|--historical|--budget flags have been split into two groups: report type (--sum|--budget|...) and accumulation type (--change|--cumulative|--historical). --sum and --change are the defaults, and your balance commands should still work as before. (Stephen Morgan et al, #1353)

• balance: The --valuechange report type has been added, showing the changes in period-end values. (Stephen Morgan, #1353)

• balance: With --budget, the first and last subperiods are enlarged to whole intervals for calculating the budget goals also. (Stephen Morgan)

• balance: In multi-period balance reports, specifying a report period now also forces leading/trailing empty columns to be displayed, without having to add -E. This is consistent with balancesheet etc. (#1396, Stephen Morgan)

• balancesheet, cashflow: declaring just a Cash account no longer hides other Asset accounts.

• check: Various improvements:

  • check name arguments may be given as case-insensitive prefixes
  • accounts and commodities may also be specified as arguments
  • ordereddates now checks each file separately (#1493)
  • ordereddates no longer supports the --unique flag or query arguments
  • payees is a new check requiring payee declarations
  • uniqueleafnames now gives a fancy error message like the others
  • the old checkdates/checkdupes commands have been dropped

• help: The help command now shows only the hledger (CLI) manual, its --info/--man/--pager flags have been renamed to -i/-m/-p, and --cat has been dropped.

• help: With a TOPIC argument (any heading or heading prefix, case insensitive), it will open the manual positioned at this topic if possible. (Similar to the new --man and --info flags described above.)

• payees: Add --used/--declared flags, like the accounts command.

• print: Now always shows amounts with all decimal places, unconstrained by commodity display style. This ensures more parseable and sensible-looking output in more cases, and behaves more like Ledger's print. (There may be a cosmetic issue with trailing zeroes.) (#931, #1465)

• print: With --match, infix matches are now scored higher, as with the add command.

• print: --match now provides debug output useful for troubleshooting.

  If you forget to give --match an argument, it can confusingly consume a following flag. Eg if you write:

  hledger print --match -x somebank   # should be: hledger print --match=somebank -x
  

  it gets quietly parsed as:

  hledger print --match="-x"
  

  Now you can at least use --debug to figure it out:

  hledger print --match -x somebank --debug
  finding best match for description: "-x"
  similar transactions:
  ...
  

• roi: Now supports the valuation options (#1417), and uses commodity display styles. Also the manual has been simplified, with some content moved to the Cookbook. (Dmitry Astapov):

journal format

• The commodity directive now properly sets the display style of the no-symbol commodity. (#1461)

csv format

• More kinds of malformed signed numbers are now ignored, in particular just a sign without a number, which simplifies sign flipping with amount-in/amount-out.

API

• API changes include:

  Hledger.Cli.Utils:
  +journalSimilarTransaction
  
  Hledger.Cli.Commands.Add:
   transactionsSimilarTo -> Hledger.Data.Journal.journalTransactionsSimilarTo
    and now takes a number-of-results argument
  

1.20.4 2021-01-29

• aregister: ignore a depth limit, as in 1.19 (#1468). In 1.20-1.20.3, aregister had stopped showing transactions in subaccounts below a depth limit. Now it properly shows all subaccount transactions, ensuring that the register's final total matches a balance report with similar arguments.

1.20.3 2021-01-14

• When searching for price chains during valuation/currency conversion:

  • It no longer hangs when there are price loops. (And in case of future bugs, it will give up rather than search forever.) (#1439)
  • It now really finds the shortest path. (#1443)
  • Useful progress info is displayed with --debug=1 or --debug=2.

• balance, incomestatement: End-valued multi-period balance change reports (eg: bal -MV) have been reverted to show value-of-change, as in previous hledger versions, rather than change-of-value, for now. (#1353, #1428) (Stephen Morgan)

• balance: End-valued balance change reports now choose the same final valuation date and show consistent results whether single-period or multi-period. (#1424) (Stephen Morgan)

• balance: the --drop option now works with csv and html output. (#1456) (Ilya Konovalov)

• check: the commodities check, and -s/--strict mode, now ignore the "AUTO" internal pseudo-commodity. (#1419) (Ilya Konovalov)

• register: Then-valued multi-period register reports (eg: register -M --value=then) now calculate the correct values. (#1449) (Stephen Morgan)

• roi: now shows a better error message when required prices are missing. (#1446) (Dmitry Astapov)

• The no-symbol commodity's input number format can now be set by a commodity directive, like other commodities. (#1461)

1.20.2 2020-12-28

• help: Fix loss of capitalisation in part of the hledger-ui manual.

• Fix the info manuals' node structure.

• Drop unused parsec dependency.

1.20.1 2020-12-15

• bal, bs, cf, is: In amount-sorted balance reports, equal-balance accounts are now reliably sorted by name. (Simon Michael, Stephen Morgan)

• help: Fix the topic hierarchy in Info manuals.

1.20 2020-12-05

general

• strict mode: with -s/--strict, hledger requires that all accounts and commodities are declared with directives.

• Reverted a stripAnsi change in 1.19.1 that caused a 3x slowdown of amount rendering in terminal reports. (#1350)

• Amount and table rendering has been improved, so that stripAnsi is no longer needed. This speeds up amount rendering in the terminal, speeding up some reports by 10% or more since 1.19. (Stephen Morgan)

• Amount eliding no longer displays corrupted ANSI codes (#1352, Stephen Morgan)

• Eliding of multicommodity amounts now makes better use of available space, avoiding unnecessary eliding (showing as many amounts as possible within 32 characters). (Stephen Morgan)

• Command line help for --no-elide now mentions that it also disables eliding of multicommodity amounts.

• Query terms containing quotes (eg to match account names containing quotes) now work properly. (#1368, Stephen Morgan)

• cli, journal: Date range parsing is more robust, fixing failing/incorrect cases such as: (Stephen Morgan)

  • a hyphenated range with just years (2017-2018)
  • a hyphenated date with no day in a hyphenated range (2017-07-2018)
  • a dotted date with no day in a dotted range (2017.07..2018.02)

• Debug output is prettier (eg, in colour), using pretty-simple instead of pretty-show.

• csv, timedot, timeclock files now respect command line --alias options, like journal files. (#859)

• Market price lookup for value reports is now more robust, fixing several bugs (and debug output is more informative). There has been a slight change in functionality: when chaining prices, we now prefer chains of all "forward" prices, even if longer, with chains involving reverse prices being the last resort. (#1402)

commands

• add: number style (eg thousands separators) no longer disturbs the value that is offered as default. (#1378)

• bal: --invert now affects -S/--sort-amount, reversing the order. (#1283, #1379) (Stephen Morgan)

• bal: --budget reports no longer insert an extra space inside the brackets. (Stephen Morgan)

• bal: --budget reports now support CSV output (#1155)

• bal, is, bs --change: Valued multiperiod balance change reports now show changes of value, rather than the value of changes. (#1353, Stephen Morgan)

• bal: clearer debug output, following debug levels policy

• check: A new command which consolidating the various check-* commands. It runs the default, strict, or specified checks and produces no output and a zero exit code if all is well.

• check-dates: this command is deprecated and will be removed in next release; use "hledger check ordereddates" instead.

• check-dupes: this command is deprecated and will be removed in next release; use "hledger check uniqueleafnames" instead.

• import: The journal's commodity styles (declared or inferred) are now applied to imported amounts, overriding their original number format.

• roi: TWR now handles same-day pnl changes and cashflows, calculation failure messages have been improved, and the documentation includes more detail and examples. (#1398) (Dmitry Astapov)

journal format

• The journal's commodity styles are now applied to forecasted transactions. (#1371)

• journal, csv: commodity style is now inferred from the first amount, as documented, not the last. This was "working wrongly" since hledger 1.12..

• A zero market price no longer causes "Ratio has zero denominator" error in valued reports. (#1373)

csv format

• The new decimal-mark rule allows reliable number parsing when CSV numbers contain digit group marks (eg thousands separators).

• The CSV reader's verbose "assignment" debug output is now at level 9.

1.19.1 2020-09-07

• Fix alignment of coloured numbers (#1345, #1349, Stephen Morgan)

• Fix a regression in account type autodetection for accounts with capitalised names. (#1341)

• Allow megaparsec 9

1.19 2020-09-01

general

• When parsing dates, the year is now required to have at least four digits. So eg we no longer accept 200/1/1 as a valid date, it would need to be written 0200/1/1. This was done for.. reasons, and is experimental; let us know if it causes you trouble.

• The --color/--colour=WHEN command line option, support for the NO_COLOR environment variable, and smarter autodetection of colour terminals have been added (#1296)

• Command line options taking a numeric argument are now validated more carefully, preventing issues with unexpected negatives or Int overflow. (Stephen Morgan)

• In queries, you can now specify a quarter like 2020q1 or q4 (the q is case-insensitive). (#1247, Henning Thieleman, Stephen Morgan)

• In report intervals, fortnightly has been added as a synonym for biweekly. (Stephen Morgan)

• -t and -l command line flags have been added as short forms of --tree and --flat (#1286)

• All reports displaying accounts now choose flat mode by default (Stephen Morgan)

• Reports now show at most 2 commodities of multicommodity amounts, unless the --no-elide flag is used. This helps keep them readable by default, since multicolumn, multicommodity balance reports otherwise tend to become very wide, especially in tree mode.

• Numbers with more than 255 decimal places, which we do not support, now give an error instead of silently misparsing. (#1326)

• Digit groups are now limited to at most 255 digits each. (#1326)

• Account aliases (on command line or in journal) containing a bad regular expression now give a more detailed error message.

• A tab character could get parsed as part of a commodity symbol, with confusing results. This no longer happens. (#1301, Dmitry Astapov)

• Debug output is now organised better by debug level. The levels are:

  0. normal command output only (no warnings)
  1. useful warnings & most common troubleshooting info (valuation, eg)
  2. common troubleshooting info, more detail
  3. report options selection
  4. report generation
  5. report generation, more detail
  6. input file reading
  7. input file reading, more detail
  8. command line parsing
  9. any other rarely needed or more in-depth info

• Added a missing lower bound for aeson, making cabal installs more reliable. (#1268)

• lib: parseAmountQueryTerm: allow whitespace around arg parts (#1312) Whitespace around the operator, sign, or number is now tolerated.

commands

• account,bal,bs,cf,is: --drop now also works in tree mode (Stephen Morgan)

• add: fix an error in the command line help (arguments are inputs, not a query)

• aregister: a new command showing a transaction-oriented account register, like hledger-ui, hledger-web, or your bank statement. Each line represents a whole transaction in one account, unlike the register command which shows individual postings possibly from multiple accounts. You might prefer aregister when reconciling real-world asset/liability accounts, and register when reviewing detailed revenues/expenses. (#1294)

• bal,bs,cf,is: boring parents are now elided by default in tabular balance reports too, like single-column reports. (Stephen Morgan)

• bal,bs,cf,is: monthly column headings are no longer elided to just the short month name, if multiple years are being displayed.

• bal --budget's column headings are now end dates rather than periods when appropriate (ie with --cumulative or --historical).

• bs,cf,is: -%/--no-total no longer forces --no-total (Stephen Morgan)

• bs,cf,is: --no-total now hides subtotals as well as the grand total (Stephen Morgan)

• codes: a new command for listing transaction codes

• print: a new sql output format has been added (Dmitry Astapov)

• roi: errors are now shown without a call stack

• tags: add --parsed flag, hide empties without --empty. With the --parsed flag, all tags or values are shown in the order they are parsed from the input data, including duplicates. With -E/--empty, any blank/empty values will also be shown, otherwise they are omitted.

journal format

• account directives can specify a new Cash account type. This is a subtype of Asset, denoting accounts which should be displayed in cashflow reports.

• The built-in regular expressions for choosing default account types have been tweaked, and documentation for account types has been improved.

csv format

• Inferring the appropriate default field separator based on file extension (, for .csv, ; for .ssv, \t for .tsv) now works as documented.

• Conditional rule patterns can now be grouped with the & (AND) operator, allowing more powerful matching. (Michael Sanders)

• Invalid csv rules files now give clearer parse error messages. (Dmitry Astapov)

• "If tables", a compact bulk format for conditional rules, have been added. (Dmitry Astapov)

• csv conversion with a lot of conditional rules is now faster (Dmitry Astapov)

1.18.1 2020-06-21

• journal: document recursive wildcards

• by default, value reports work as in 1.17; to infer market prices from transactions, add the new --infer-value flag. (#1239, #1253)

• organise debug output better

• print: amounts in csv output now have commodity symbol, digit group separators and prices removed (Dmitry Astapov)

1.18 2020-06-07

General

• The --forecast flag now takes an optional argument (--forecast=PERIODICEXPR), allowing periodic transactions to start/end on any date and to overlap recorded transactions. (#835, #1236) (Dmitry Astapov)

• An upper case file extension no longer confuses file format detection. (#1225)

• In the commands list, redundant source scripts are now hidden properly when a corresponding .com/.exe file exists. (#1225)

• We now show .. instead of - to indicate date ranges, eg in report titles, to stand out more from hyphenated dates. (Stephen Morgan)

• Period expressions (eg in -p, date:, and periodic rules) now accept to, until, -, or .. as synonyms. (Stephen Morgan)

• When parsing amounts, whitespace between sign and number is now allowed.

• A clearer error message is shown on encountering a malformed regular expression.

commands

• commands allowing different output formats now list their supported formats accurately in --help (#689)

• commands allowing JSON output now actually produce JSON (#689)

• bal, bs: show .. (not ,,) in report titles, like other reports

journal format

• We now also infer market prices from transactions, like Ledger. See https://hledger.org/hledger.html#market-prices (#1239).

  Upgrade note: this means value reports (-V, -X etc.) can give different output compared to hledger 1.17. If needed, you can prevent this by adding a P directive declaring the old price, on or after the date of the transaction causing the issue.

• The include directive now accepts a file format prefix, like the -f/--file option. This works with glob patterns too, applying the prefix to each path. This can be useful when included files don't have the standard file extension, eg:

  include timedot:2020*.md
  

• We now accept (and ignore) Ledger-style lot dates ([DATE]) and four lot price forms ({PRICE}, {{PRICE}}, {=PRICE}, {{=PRICE}}), anywhere after the posting amount but before any balance assertion.

• We now accept Ledger-style parenthesised "virtual posting costs" ((@), (@@)). In hledger these are equivalent to the unparenthesised form.

• The unbalanced transaction error message is clearer, especially when postings all have the same sign, and is split into multiple lines for readability.

csv format

• You can now generate up to 99 postings in a transaction. (Vladimir Sorokin)

• You can now generate postings with an explicit 0 amount. (#1112)

• For each posting, when both numbered and unnumbered amount assignments are active (eg: both amount and amount1), we ignore the unnumbered ones. This makes it easier to override old amount rules.

• Fix a 1.17.1 regression involving amount-in/amount-out. (#1226)

• Assigning too many non-zero or zero values to a posting amount now gives a clearer error. (#1226)

1.17.1.1 2020-03-19

• update bounds after some belated hledger-* version bumps

1.17.1 2020-03-19

• csv: amount1 no longer forces a second posting or second posting amount. The "special handling for pre 1.17 rules" should now be less noticeable. amount1/amount2 no longer force a second posting or explicit amounts on both postings. (Only amount/amount-in/amount-out do that.) Error messages and handling of corner cases may be more robust, also.

• journal: a commodity directive without decimal mark now gives a more verbose error message with examples

• journal: inclusive balance assignments now work (#1207)

• require newer Decimal, math-functions libs to ensure consistent rounding behaviour, even when built with old GHCs/snapshots. hledger uses banker's rounding (rounds to nearest even number, eg 0.5 displayed with zero decimal places is "0").

1.17 2020-03-01

General

• hledger's default date format is now YYYY-MM-DD (ISO-8601 dates). (Brian Wignall, Jakob Schöttl, Simon Michael)

• Drop the file format auto-detection feature.

  For a long time hledger has auto-detected the file format when it's not known, eg when reading from a file with unusual extension (like .dat or .txt), or from standard input (-f-), or when using the include directive (which currently ignores file extensions). This was done by trying all readers until one succeeded. This worked well in practice. But recent changes to timedot format have made this kind of auto-detection unreliable. (timedot and journal formats overlap).

  For predictability and to minimise confusion, hledger will no longer guess; when there's no file extension or reader prefix available, it always assumes journal format.

  To specify one of the other formats, you must use its standard file extension (.timeclock, .timedot, .csv, .ssv, .tsv), or a reader prefix (-f csv:foo.txt, -f timedot:-).

  Experimental, feedback welcome.

• Fix extra $ symbol (Mateus Furquim)

• --output-format now rejects invalid formats

• Numbers in JSON output now provide a floating point Number representation as well as our native Decimal object representation, since the later can sometimes contain 255-digit integers. The floating point numbers can have up to 10 decimal digits (and an unbounded number of integer digits.) Experimental, suggestions needed. (#1195)

• Fix finding latest date in queryEndDate Or queries and simplify date comparison code. (Stephen Morgan)

• Fix issue 457. (Jacek Generowicz) Issue #457 pointed out that commands such as

  hledger ui 'amt:>200'
  

  failed. This was because the process of dispatching from hledger ui to hledger-ui (note addition of -) lost the quotes around amt:>20 and the > character was interpreted as a shell redirection operator, rather than as part of the argument.

  The machinery for quoting or escaping arguments which contain characters which require quoting or escaping (thus far whitespace and quotes) already existed. This solution simply adds shell stdio redirection characters to this set.

commands

• add: you can use < to undo and redo previous inputs (Gaith Hallak)

• bs, cf, is, bal, print, reg: support json output

• bs, cf, is: fix excess subreport columns in csv output

• bs, cf, is, bal: fix an issue with border intersections in --pretty-tables output. (Eric Mertens)

• close: fix a rounding bug that could generate unbalanced transactions. (#1164)

• close: hide cost prices by default, show them with --show-costs. close no longer preserves costs (transaction prices) unless you ask it to, since that can generate huge entries when there are many foreign currency/investment transactions. (#1165)

• close: equity amounts are omitted by default, for simpler entries; -x/--explicit shows them (usually causing more postings). (#1165)

• close: --interleaved generates equity postings alongside each closed account, making troubleshooting easier.

• close: "equity:opening/closing balances" is now the default closing and opening account.

• close: --close-desc/--open-desc customise the closing/opening transaction descriptions. (#1165)

• close: some --open*/--close* flags have been simplified for memorability:

  --closing -> --close --opening -> --open --close-to -> --close-acct --open-from -> --open-acct

  The old flags are accepted as hidden aliases, and deprecated. (#1165)

• print, register: a new valuation type, --value=then, shows the market value at each posting's date.

• print: -V/-X/--value now imply -x/--explicit, as -B/--cost does. This avoids a bug where print -V of a transaction with an implicit commodity conversion would convert only some of its postings to value.

journal format

• The include directive no longer tries all readers. It now picks just one, based on the included file's extension, defaulting to journal. (It doesn't yet handle a reader prefix.)

• The default commodity (D) directive now limits display precision too. (#1187) D directives are now fully equivalent to commodity directives for setting a commodity's display style. (Previously it couldn't limit the number of decimal places.) When both kinds of directive exist, commodity directives take precedence. When there are multiple D directives in the journal, only the last one affects display style.

csv format

• Conditional blocks can now match single fields. \o/

• The experimental --separator command line option has been dropped, replaced a new separator directive in CSV rule files. (Aleksandar Dimitrov) Also the .tsv and .ssv file extensions are now recognised, and set the default separator to TAB and semicolon respectively. (#1179)

• Allow manual assignment of the "expenses:unknown" account name. (#1192)

• CSV rule keywords are now case insensitive. (Aleksandar Dimitrov)

timeclock format

• Misc. fixes making parsing more robust. (Jakob Schöttl)

timedot format

• More support for org mode: org headlines can now be used for date lines and timelog items (the stars are ignored). Also, any org headlines before the first date line are ignored.

• You can now write a description after a date, which will be used in all of that day's transactions.

1.16.2 2020-01-14

• add support for megaparsec 8 (#1175)

• close: mention --close-to/--open-from in docs

1.16.1 2019-12-03

• Drop unnecessary mtl-compat dependency

• Fix building with GHC 8.0, 8.2

1.16 2019-12-01

General

• add support for GHC 8.8, base-compat 0.11 (#1090)

• drop support for GHC 7.10

• The benchmark suite has been disabled.

• The --anon flag now also anonymises transaction codes and account names declared with account directives. (Mykola Orliuk) (#901)

commands

• balance/bs/cf/is: balance commands now support the -%/--percent flag to show amounts as percentages of the column's total. (Michael Kainer)

  If there are multiple commodities involved in a report hledger bails with an error message. This can be avoided by using -B/--cost. Also note that if one uses -% with the balance command the chances are high that all numbers are 0. This is due to the fact that by default balance sums up to zero. If one wants to use -% in a meaningful way with balance one has to add a query.

  In order to keep the implementation as simple as possible --tree has no influence over how the percentages are calculated, i.e., the percentages always represent the fraction of the columns total. If one wants to know the percentages relative to a parent account, one has to use a query to narrow down the accounts.

• balance: --budget no longer errors when there is neither budget nor transactions in the report period (Dmitry Astapov)

• balance: --budget has improved debug output (shows budget txns) (Dmitry Astapov)

• check-dates: now sets the exit status code (Amitai Burstein)

• close: no longer strips zeroes after the decimal mark, and preserves parseable output (#1137)

• close: the --close-to, --open-from options allow closing/opening account names to be chosen

• import: create the journal if missing, like the add command Streamlines import/migration instructions.

• import: --catchup marks all transactions imported, without importing

• import: more informative output: mention the input files, also show a message when nothing was imported

• prices: show price amounts with proper display style; always show full precision

• roi: don't give an error with empty input data (Dmitry Astapov)

• tests: unit tests are now run by tasty, and show coloured output by default (#1090). Test running options have changed, see the command help. Some unit tests have been collapsed, so the reported test count has dropped a little.

journal format

• Fixed: wrong dates generated by certain periodic transaction rules, eg "~ every 12 months from 2019/04". (Dmitry Astapov) (#1085)

csv format

CSV conversion is now more powerful (#1095, Dmitry Astapov, Simon Michael):

• A variable number of postings can be generated, from zero to nine. (#627, #1095)

• In conditional blocks, skip can be used to skip one or more records after a pattern match, or the new end rule can be used to skip all remaining records. (#1076)

• The new balance-type CSV rule controls which kind of balance assertions are generated (=, ==, =, ==)

• Postings with balance assignments can be generated. (#1000)

• Both the amount-in/amount-out fields having a non-empty value is now accepted, as long as one of them is zero. (#570)

• Line feeds/carriage returns in (quoted) CSV values are now converted to spaces during conversion. (#416, #841)

• Field assignments can now unset a field (eg a posting can be suppressed by assigning no value to its account).

• CSV records with varying lengths are now allowed; short records will be padded with empty fields as needed. This allows us to handle eg exported Google spreadsheets, where trailing empty fields are omitted.

• Journals generated from CSV are now finalised and checked like ordinary journals (#1000). So invalid transactions generated from CSV will be rejected, amount styles will be standardised etc.

• Fixed: we no longer add an extra (third) space between description and comment.

• Fixed: whitespace on the line after an if block no longer causes misparsing. (#1120)

• Fixed: an empty field assignment no longer consumes the next line. (#1001)

• Fixed: interpolation of field names containing punctuation now works.

• Docs have been rewritten and clarified.

Migration notes:

• When printing from CSV, there is now one less space between transaction descriptions and comments, which may generate noisy diffs if you are comparing old and new reports. diff -w (--ignore-all-space) will filter these out.

• CSV rules now give you more freedom to generate any journal entries you want, including malformed or unbalanced ones. The csv reader now checks the journal after conversion, so it will report any problems with the generated entries.

• Balance assertions generated from CSV are not checked, currently. This is appropriate when you are downloading partial CSV data to be merged into your main journal. If you do need to check balance assertions right away, you can pipe through hledger again:

  $ hledger -f a.csv print | hledger -f- print
  

1.15.2 2019-09-05

• -V and -X now respect a report end date (set with -e or -p or date:) when choosing the valuation date (which determines the market prices used). This is how -V works in hledger 1.14 and Ledger, and it means that -V isn't exactly equivalent to either --value=end or --value=now. Possibly some other corner cases in valuation have been fixed as well. "Effect of --value on reports" in the hledger manual has been updated and is more accurate.

1.15.1 2019-09-02

• add commodities, descriptions, diff, notes, payees commands to manual

1.15 2019-09-01

General

• There is a new valuation option --value=TYPE[,COMM], with backwards-compatible -B/--cost, -V/--market, -X/--exchange=COMM variants. These provide control over valuation date (#329), and inference of indirect market prices (similar to Ledger's -X) (#131). Experimental.

• Market valuation (-V/-X/--value) is now much faster (#999):

  +-------------------------------------------++--------------+--------------+
  |                                           || hledger-1.14 | hledger-1.15 |
  +===========================================++==============+==============+
  | -f examples/10000x1000x10.journal bal -Y  ||         2.43 |         2.44 |
  | -f examples/10000x1000x10.journal bal -YV ||        44.91 |         6.48 |
  | -f examples/10000x1000x10.journal reg -Y  ||         4.60 |         4.15 |
  | -f examples/10000x1000x10.journal reg -YV ||        61.09 |         7.21 |
  +-------------------------------------------++--------------+--------------+
  

• How date options like -M and -p interact has been updated and clarified. (Jakob Schöttl) (#1008, #1009, #1011)

• Restore --aux-date and --effective as --date2 aliases (#1034). These Ledger-ish spellings were dropped over the years, to improve --help's layout. Now we support them again, as semi-hidden flags (--help doesn't list them, but they are mentioned in --date2's help).

commands

• add, web: on Windows, trying to add transactions to a file path containing trailing periods (eg hledger add -f Documents.\.hledger.journal) now gives an error, since this could cause data loss otherwise (#1056). This affects the add command and hledger-web's add form.

• bal: --budget: don't always convert to cost.

• bal: --budget: don't show a percentage when budgeted and actual amounts are in different commodities.

• bal/bs/bse: -H/--historical or --cumulative now disables -T/--row-total (#329). Multiperiod balance reports which show end balances (eg, bal -MH or bs -M) no longer show a Totals column, since summing end balances generally doesn't make sense.

• bs: show end date(s) in title, not transactions date span (#1078) Compound balance reports showing ending balances (eg balancesheet), now show the ending date (single column) or range of ending dates (multi column) in their title. ,, (double comma) is used rather than - (hyphen) to suggest a sequence of discrete dates rather than a continuous span.

• close: preserve transaction prices (costs) accurately (#1035). The generated closing/opening transactions were collapsing/misreporting the costs in balances involving multiple costs. Now, each separately-priced amount gets its own posting. (And only the last of these (for each commodity) gets a balance assertion.) Also the equity posting's amount is now always shown explicitly, which in multicommodity situations means that multiple equity postings are shown. The upshot is that a balance -B report will be unchanged after the closing & opening transactions generated by the close command.

• descriptions, payees, notes commands added (Caleb Maclennan)

• diff: Gabriel Ebner's hledger-diff is now a built in command, and https://github.com/gebner/hledger-diff is deprecated.

• help: don't require a journal file

• print: now also canonicalises the display style of balance assertion amounts (#1042)

• reg: show negative amounts in red, like balance and Ledger

• reg: fix --average, broken since 1.12 (#1003)

• stats: show count of market prices (P directives), and the commodities covered

• tags: add --values flag to list tag values.

• tags: now runs much faster when there many tags

journal format

• Transactions and postings generated/modified by periodic transaction rules and/or transaction modifier rules are now marked with tags (generated-transaction, generated-posting, modified) for easier troubleshooting and filtering.

csv format

• When interpolating CSV values, outer whitespace is now stripped. This removes a potential snag in amount field assignments (#1051), and hopefully is harmless and acceptable otherwise.

• We no longer add inter-field spaces in CSV error messages. Some CSV errors would show the problem record, eg:

  2000-01-01,a,"1"
  

  with extra spaces added, eg:

  the CSV record is: "2000-01-01", "a", "1"
  

  which was inaccurate and not valid RFC-4180 CSV format.

• CSV parse errors are human-readable again (broken since 1.11) (#1038)

• CSV rules now allow the amount to be unassigned, if there is an assignment to "balance" (generating a balance assignment in this case). (#1000)

1.14.2 2019-03-20

• require easytest <0.3 to fix build issue

• fix some CSV parse errors which weren't in human readable format

1.14.1 2019-03-01

• fix missing Commodities.txt build error

1.14 2019-03-01

• journal: subaccount-including balance assertions have been added, with syntax =* and ==* (experimental) (#290)

• new commodities command lists commodity symbols

• new --invert option flips sign of amounts in reports

1.13.2 (2019/02/04)

• print, register: restore the accidentally dropped -o, -O flags (#967)

1.13.1 (2019/02/02)

• stop depending on here to avoid haskell-src-meta/stackage blockage.

1.13 (2019/02/01)

• cli: reorganised commands list. Addons now have a + prefix.

• cli: the command line help and manual section for all hledger's commands are now consistent, and generated from the same source.

• cli: comprehensive bash completion support is now provided (in shell-completion/). See how-to in the Cookbook. (Jakob Schöttl)

• balance --budget: budget amounts now aggregate hierarchically, like account balances. Unbudgeted accounts can be shown with -E/--empty (along with zero-balance accounts), and the --show-budgeted flag has been dropped. (Dmitry Astapov)

• balance: new --transpose flag switches the rows and columns of tabular balance reports (in txt and csv output formats). (Dmitry Astapov)

• close: generated balance assertions now have exact amounts with all decimal digits, ignoring display precision. Also, balance assertion amounts will no longer contain prices. (#941, #824, #958)

• files: now shows up in the commands list

• import: be silent when there's nothing to import

• roi: percentages smaller than 0.01% are displayed as zero (Dmitry Astapov)

• stats, ui: correct file order is preserved when using --auto (#949)

• journal: account directive: the account name can now be followed by a comment on the same line

• journal: account directive: account types for the bs/bse/cf/is commands can now be set with a type: tag, whose value is Asset, Liability, Equity, Revenue, Expense, A, L, E, R or X (case-insensitive). The previous syntax (account assets A) is now deprecated.

• journal: account directive: account sort codes like account 1000 (introduced in 1.9, deprecated in 1.11) are no longer supported.

• journal: transaction modifiers (auto postings) can affect periodic transactions (--auto can add postings to transactions generated with --forecast). (Dmitry Astapov)

• journal: balance assertion errors now show exact amounts with all decimal digits. Previously it was possible, in case of a commodity directive limiting the display precision, to have a balance assertion error with asserted and actual amounts looking the same. (#941)

• journal: fixed a periodic transaction parsing failure (#942) (Dmitry Astapov)

1.12.1 (2018/12/03)

• roi: use math-functions lib instead of statistics, be more stackage nightly compatible

1.12 (2018/12/02)

• install script: ensure a new-enough version of stack; more informative output

• build with GHC 8.6/base-4.12 (Peter Simons)

• add required upper bound for statistics (Samuel May)

• --anon anonymises more thoroughly (including linked original postings) (Moritz Kiefer)

• unbalanced transaction errors now include location info (Mykola Orliuk)

• accounts command: --drop also affects the default flat output, without needing an explicit --flat flag

• accounts command: the --codes flag has been dropped

• accounts command: filtering by non-account-name queries now works

• add command: fix transaction rendering regression during data entry and in journal file

• balance command: fix wrongful eliding of zero-balance parent accounts in tree mode (Dmitry Astapov)

• journal format, bs/bse/cf/is commands: account directives can declare account types (#877) Previously you had to use one of the standard english account names (assets, liabilities..) for top-level accounts, if you wanted them to appear in the right place in the balancesheet, balancesheetequity, cashflow or incomestatement reports.

  Now you can use your preferred account names, and use account directives to declare which accounting class (Asset, Liability, Equity, Revenue or eXpense) an account (and its subaccounts) belongs to, by writing one of the letters A, L, E, R, X after the account name, after two or more spaces. This syntax may change (see issue). Experimental.

  Currently we allow unlimited account type declarations anywhere in the account tree. So you could declare a liability account somewhere under assets, and maybe a revenue account under that, and another asset account even further down. In such cases you start to see oddities like accounts appearing in multiple places in a tree-mode report. I have left it this way for now in case it helps with, eg, modelling contra accounts, or combining multiple files each with their own account type declarations. (In that scenario, if we only allowed type declarations on top-level accounts, or only allowed a single account of each type, complications seem likely.)

• journal format: periodic transaction rules now require a double space separator. In periodic transaction rules which specify a transaction description or same-line transaction comment, this must be separated from the period expression by two or more spaces, to prevent ambiguous parsing. Eg this will parse correctly as "monthly" thanks to the double space:

  ~ monthly  In 2020 we'll end this monthly transaction.
  

• journal format: exact/complete balance assertions (Samuel May). A stronger kind of balance assertion, written with a double equals sign, asserts an account's complete account balance, not just the balance in one commodity. (But only if it is a single-commodity balance, for now.) Eg:

  1/1
    (a)  A 1
    (a)  B 1
    (a)  0   =  A 1   ; commodity A balance assertion, succeeds
    (a)  0   == A 1   ; complete balance assertion, fails
  

• journal format: account directives now allow whitespace or a comment after the account name

• journal format: using ~ for home directory in include directives now works (#896) (Mykola Orliuk)

• journal format: prevent misleading parse error messages with cyclic include directives (#853) (Alex Chen)

• journal format: transaction modifier multipliers handle total-priced amounts correctly (#928). Multipliers (*N) in transaction modifier rules did not multiply total-priced amounts properly. Now the total prices are also multiplied, keeping the transaction balanced.

• journal format: do amount inference/balance assignments/assertions before transaction modifiers (#893, #908) (Jesse Rosenthal) Previously, transaction modifier (auto postings) rules were applied before missing amounts were inferred. This meant amount multipliers could generate too many missing-amount postings, making the transaction unbalanceable (#893).

  Now, missing amount inference (and balance assignments, and balance assertions, which are interdependent) are done earlier, before transaction modifier rules are applied (#900, #903).

  Also, we now disallow the combination of balance assignments and transaction modifier rules which both affect the same account, which could otherwise cause confusing balance assertion failures (#912). (Because assignments now generate amounts to satisfy balance assertions before transaction modifier rules are applied (#908).)

• journal format: periodic transaction rules are now aware of Y default year directives. (#892) Ie when a default year Y is in effect, they resolve partial or relative dates using Y/1/1 as the reference date, rather than today's date.

1.11.1 (2018/10/06)

• fix wrong transaction rendering in balance assertion errors and when using the add command

1.11 (2018/9/30)

• The default display order of accounts is now influenced by the order of account directives. Accounts declared by account directives are displayed first (top-most), in declaration order, followed by undeclared accounts in alphabetical order. Numeric account codes are no longer used, and are ignored and considered deprecated.

  So if your accounts are displaying in a weird order after upgrading, and you want them alphabetical like before, just sort your account directives alphabetically.

• Account sorting (by name, by declaration, by amount) is now more robust and supported consistently by all commands (accounts, balance, bs..) in all modes (tree & flat, tabular & non-tabular).

• close: new --opening/--closing flags to print only the opening or closing transaction

• files: a new command to list included files

• prices: query arguments are now supported. Prices can be filtered by date, and postings providing transaction prices can also be filtered.

• rewrite: help clarifies relation to print --auto (#745)

• roi: a new command to compute return on investment, based on hledger-irr

• test: has more verbose output, more informative failure messages, and no longer tries to read the journal

• csv: We use a more robust CSV lib (cassava) and now support non-comma separators, eg --separator ';' (experimental, this flag will probably become a CSV rule) (#829)

• csv: interpolated field names in values are now properly case insensitive, so this works:

  fields  ...,Transaction_Date,...
  date %Transaction_Date
  

• journal: D (default commodity) directives no longer break multiplier amounts in transaction modifiers (AKA automated postings) (#860)

• journal: "Automated Postings" have been renamed to "Transaction Modifiers".

• journal: transaction comments in transaction modifier rules are now parsed correctly. (#745)

• journal: when include files form a cycle, we give an error instead of hanging.

• upper-case day/month names in period expressions no longer give an error (#847, #852)

1.10 (2018/6/30)

• journal: many parse error messages have become more informative, and some now show the source line and error location.

• journal: ;tag: is no longer parsed as a tag named ";tag" (#655)

• journal: transaction price amounts having their own price amounts is now a parse error

• journal: amounts with space as digit group separator and trailing whitespace now parse correctly (#780)

• journal: in amounts containing digits and a single space, the space is now interpreted as a digit group separator, not a decimal separator (#749)

• journal: in commodity/format/D directives, the amount must now include a decimal separator.

  When more precise control is needed over number parsing, our recommended solution is commodity directives. Commodity directives that don't specify the decimal separator leave things ambiguous, increasing the chance of misparsing numbers. In some cases it could cause amounts with a decimal point to be parsed as if with a digit group separator, so 1.234 became 1234.

  It seems the simple and really only way to do this reliably is to require an explicit decimal point character. Most folks probably do this already. Unfortunately, it makes another potential incompatibility with ledger and beancount journals. But the error message will be clear and easy to work around.

• journal: directives currently have diverse and somewhat tricky semantics, especially with multiple files. The manual now describes their behaviour precisely.

• journal: alias and apply account directives now affect account directives (#825)

• journal: periodic transactions can now have all the usual transaction fields (status mark, code, description, comment), for generating more expressive forecast transactions.

• journal: forecast transactions now have the generating period expression attached as a tag named "recur".

• journal: periodic transactions now start on the first instance of the recurring date, rather than the day after the last regular transaction (#750)

• journal: periodic transaction rules now allow period expressions relative to today's date

• csv: amount-in/amount-out errors are more detailed

• balance: --drop is now ignored when not in flat mode, rather than producing a corrupted report (#754)

• budget: --drop now preserves the top-level account in --budget reports

• register: in CSV output, the code field is now included (#746)

• smart dates now allow the YYYYMM format, and are better documented

• use hledger-lib 1.10

1.9.1 (2018/4/30)

• use hledger-lib 1.9.1

• budget (balance --budget): monthly columns are displayed in the proper order. This fixes a regression in 1.9.

• budget: budgets can be built from periodic transactions with different intervals again. In 1.9, budgets were restricted to a single interval, but this was a mistake. This restores the 1.5 behaviour.

• budget: budget reports are more intuitive and much less likely to produce no output.

• budget: when no report interval is specified, a budget report for the whole journal period is shown.

• budget: periodic transactions and the requested report period can each have their own start/end dates, and the resulting report will span the union of those periods, showing zeroes where data is missing.

• budget: total row and total/average columns are now calculated correctly

• budget: actual, percentage, and goal amounts are now aligned in columns for better readability (usually, unless numbers get huge).

• budget: combining --budget and --sort-amount is not yet supported and now gives an error.

• csv: handle "-%amount" in a rule when the CSV amount is parenthesised (#736)

• journal: automated postings are now generated early, before journal finalisation, so they are present for amount inference, transaction balancing, and balance assertions (#729)

• journal: automated postings are now inserted right after the posting that triggered them (#729)

• cli: command-line account aliases are now applied early, before journal finalisation, so they are equivalent to alias directives in the journal (#730)

• journal: inferred amounts now have the appropriate standard amount style applied (setting the precision correctly, eg). (#737)

• journal: when checking for balanced transactions, amount styles declared with commodity directives are also used (previously only inferred amount styles were).

1.9 (2018/3/31)

• support ghc 8.4, latest deps

• journal: account directives can define a numeric account code to customize sorting. bal/bs/cf/is will sort accounts by account code, if any, then account name.

• journal: support scientific number notation (#704, #706)

• csv: reading a CSV file containing no records is no longer an error

• cli: when the system text encoding is UTF-8, ignore any UTF-8 BOM prefix found when reading files. (Paypal's new CSV has this BOM prefix, causing a confusing parse error.)

• cli: tabular reports no longer have a trailing blank line added. (This allows omitting the ">=0" delimiters in our functional tests, making them easier to read and maintain.)

• acc: the accounts command now has --declared and --used flags

• bal: the --invert flag flips all signs

• bal: --drop now works with CSV output

• bal/bs/bse/cf/is: show overall report span in title

• bal/bs/bse/cf/is: show short month names as headings in monthly reports

• bal/bs/bse/cf/is: these commands can now generate HTML output

• bal/bs/is/cf: drop short name and indent fields from multicolumn CSV

• bs/bse/cf/is: these, the "financial statement" commands, now show normal income, liability and equity balances as positive numbers. Negative numbers now indicate a contra-balance (eg an overdrawn checking account), a net loss, or a negative net worth. This makes these reports more like conventional financial statements, and easier to read and share with others. (Other commands, like balance, have not changed.) (experimental)

• bs/cf/is: always show a tabular report, even with no report interval. Previously you would get a simple borderless report like the original balance command. Less code, fewer bugs.

• bs/bse/cf/is: in CSV output, don't repeat the headings row for each subreport

• budget: warn that CSV output with bal --budget is unimplemented

• budget: bal --budget shows budget goals even with no or zero actual amounts. Makes budget reports more intuitive, at the cost of a temporary hack which may misorder columns in some cases (if actual and budget activity occur in a different range of columns).

• budget: --budget uses only periodic txns with the selected interval.
  Budgets with different interval, eg a daily and weekly budget, are independent.

• budget: show mostly fixed-width columns for readability

• budget: fix bug where a budget report could include budget goals ending on the day before the report start date (splitSpan issue)

• close: the equity command has been renamed to close. It now ignores any begin date (it always closes historical end balances). It also ignores --date2.

1.5 (2017/12/31)

• --auto adds Ledger-style automated postings to transactions (Dmitry Astapov, Mykola Orliuk)

• --forecast generates Ledger-style periodic transactions in the future (Dmitry Astapov, Mykola Orliuk)

• -V/--value uses today's market prices by default, not those of last transaction date. #683, #648

• add: suggest implied (parent) and declared (by account directives) account names also

• bal: --budget shows performance compared to budget goals defined with periodic transactions. Accounts with budget goals are displayed folded (depth-clipped) at a depth matching the budget specification. Unbudgeted accounts are hidden, or with --show-unbudgeted, shown at their usual depth. (Dmitry Astapov)

• import: the output of --dry-run is now valid journal format

• print: -B shows converted amounts again, as in 1.1, even without -x. #551 (Mykola Orliuk, Simon Michael)

• tag: the first argument now filters tag names, additional arguments filter transactions (#261)

• remove upper bounds on all but hledger* and base (experimental)

1.4 (2017/9/30)

• cli: a @FILE argument reads flags & args from FILE, one per line

• cli: reorganized commands list, added some new command aliases:

  • accounts: a
  • balance: b
  • print: p, txns
  • register: r

• cli: accept -NUM as a shortcut for --depth=NUM (eg: -2)

• cli: improve command-line help for --date2 (#604)

• cli: make --help and -h the same, drop --man and --info for now (#579)

• help: offers multiple formats, accepts topic substrings. The separate info/man commands have been dropped. help now chooses an appropriate documentation format as follows:

  • it uses info if available,
  • otherwise man if available,
  • otherwise $PAGER if defined,
  • otherwise less if available,
  • otherwise it prints on stdout
  • (and it always prints on stdout when piped).

  You can override this with the --info/--man/--pager/--cat flags. (#579)

• bal/bs/cf/is: --sort-amount/-S sorts by largest amount instead of account name

• bs/cf/is: support --output-file and --output-format=txt|csv The CSV output should be reasonably ok for dragging into a spreadsheet and reformatting.

• bal/bs/cf/is: consistent double space between columns, consistent single final blank line. Previously, amounts wider than the column headings would be separated by only a single space.

• bs/is: don't let an empty subreport disable the grand totals (fixes #588)

• cf: exclude asset accounts with ":fixed" in their name (Christian G. Warden, Simon Michael, #584)

• new balancesheetequity command: like balancesheet but also shows equity accounts (Nicholas Niro)

• new import command: adds new transactions seen in one or more input files to the main journal file

• print: --new shows only transactions added since last time (saves state in .latest.JOURNALFILE file)

• new tags command: lists tags in matched transactions

• most addons formerly shipped in bin/ are now builtin commands. These include: check-dates, check-dupes, equity, prices, print-unique, register-match, rewrite.

• refactor: new Commands module and subdirectory. Builtin commands are now gathered more tightly in a single module, Hledger.Cli.Commands, facilitating change. The legacy "convert" command has been dropped.

• refactor: BalanceView -> CompoundBalanceCommand

• deps: drop support for directory < 1.2

• deps: allow ansi-terminal 0.7

• deps: drop oldtime flag, require time 1.5+

• deps: simplify shakespeare bounds

• deps: remove ghc < 7.6 support

1.3.1 (2017/8/25)

• bs/is: don't let an empty subreport disable the grand totals (#588)

• allow megaparsec 6 (#594)

• allow megaparsec-6.1 (Hans-Peter Deifel)

• restore upper bounds on hledger packages

1.3 (2017/6/30)

The "uncleared" transaction/posting status, and associated UI flags and keys, have been renamed to "unmarked" to remove ambiguity and confusion. This means that we have dropped the --uncleared flag, and our -U flag now matches only unmarked things and not pending ones. See the issue and linked mail list discussion for more background. (#564)

Also the -P short flag has been added for --pending, and the -U/-P/-C flags can be combined.

bs/is: fix "Ratio has zero denominator" error (#535)

bs/is/cf: fix --flat (#552) (Justin Le, Simon Michael)

bal/bs/is/cf: show negative amounts in red (Simon Michael, Justin Le). These commands now shows negative amounts in red, when hledger detects that ANSI codes are supported, (ie when TERM is not "dumb" and stdout is not being redirected or piped).

print: show pending mark on postings (fixes #563). A pending mark on postings is now displayed, just like a cleared mark. Also there will now be a space between the mark and account name.

print: amounts are now better aligned, eg when there are posting status marks or virtual postings

1.2 (2017/3/31)

CLI

"hledger" and "hledger -h" now print a better organised commands list and general usage message respectively (#297).

The common reporting flags can now be used anywhere on the command line.

Fixed deduplication of addons in commands list.

Fixed ugly stack traces in command line parse error messages.

The -V/--value flag is now a global report flag, so it works with balance, print, register, balancesheet, incomestatement, cashflow, etc. (Justin Le)

The --pivot global reporting option replaces all account names with the value of some other field or tag. It has been improved, eg:

• we don't add the field/tag name name as a prefix
• when pivoting on a tag, if the tag is missing we show a blank (rather than showing mixed tag values and account names)
• a pipe character delimiter may be used in descriptions to get a more accurate and useful payee report (hledger balance --pivot payee)

options cleanups

Addons

Easier installation: move add-ons and example scripts to bin/, convert to stack scripts, add a build script to install all deps, add some functional tests, test add-ons with Travis CI, add installation docs to download page.

Improved docs: all addons now contain their own documentation. Most of them (all but hledger-budget) use a new reduced-boilerplate declaration format and can show short (-h) and long (--help) command line help. (Long help is declared with pre and postambles to the generated options help, short help is that truncated at the start of the hledger common flags.)

hledger now shows a cleaner list of addon commands, showing only the compiled version of an addon when both source and compiled versions are in $PATH. (Addons with .exe extension or no extension are considered compiled. Modification time is not checked, ie, an old compiled addon will override a newer source version. If there are three or more versions of an addon, all are shown. )

New addons added/included:

• autosync - example symlink to ledger-autosync
• budget - experimental budget reporting command supporting Ledger-like periodic transactions and automated transactions (Mykola Orliuk)
• chart - pie-chart-generating prototype, a repackaging of the old hledger-chart tool
• check - more powerful balance assertions (Michael Walker)
• check-dupes - find accounts sharing the same leaf name (Stefano Rodighiero)
• prices - show all market price records (Mykola Orliuk)
• register-match - a helper for ledger-autosync's deduplication, finds best match for a transaction description

The equity command now always generates a valid journal transaction, handles prices better, and adds balance assertions (Mykola Orliuk).

The rewrite command is more robust and powerful (Mykola Orliuk):

• in addition to command-line rewrite options, it understands rewrite rules defined in the journal, similar to Ledger's automated transactions (#99). Eg:

  = ^income
      (liabilities:tax)  *.33
  
  = expenses:gifts
      budget:gifts  *-1
      assets:budget  *1
  

• it can generate diff output, allowing easier review of the proposed changes, and safe modification of original journal files (preserving file-level comments and directives). Eg:

  hledger-rewrite --diff Agency --add-posting 'Expenses:Taxes  *0.17' | patch
  

• rewrites can affect multiple postings in a transaction, not just one.

• posting-specific dates are handled better

balance

A new --pretty-tables option uses unicode characters for rendering table borders in multicolumn reports (#522) (Moritz Kiefer)

balancesheet/cashflow/incomestatement

These commands are now more powerful, able to show multicolumn reports and generally having the same features as the balance command. (Justin Le)

balancesheet has always ignored a begin date specified with a -b or -p option; now it also ignores a begin date specified with a date: query. (Related discussion at #531)

print

The output of print is now always a valid journal (fixes #465) (Mykola Orliuk).

print now tries to preserves the format of implicit/explicit balancing amounts and prices, by default. To print with all amounts explicit, use the new --explicit/-x flag (fixes #442). (Mykola Orliuk)

Don't lose the commodity of zero amounts/zero balance assertions (fixes #475) (Mykola Orliuk)

Misc

Fix a regression in the readability of option parsing errors (#478) (Hans-Peter Deifel)

Fix an example in Cli/Main.hs (Steven R. Baker)

Allow megaparsec 5.2 (#503)

1.1 (2016/12/31)

balance

• with -V, don't ignore market prices in the future (#453, #403)

• with -V and multiple same-date market prices, use the last parsed not the highest price (#403)

misc

• fix non-existent "oldtime" dependency (#431)

• extra/hledger-equity.hs now generates valid journal format when there are multiple commodities

1.0.1 (2016/10/27)

• allow megaparsec 5.0 or 5.1

• fix benchmark build failure (#423)

1.0 (2016/10/26)

add

• suggest only one commodity at a time as default amount (#383)

  (since we currently can't input more than one at a time)

balance

• added --change flag for consistency

• -H/--historical now also affects single-column balance reports with a start date (#392).

  This has the same effect as just omitting the start date, but adds consistency.

• in CSV output, render amounts in one-line format (#336)

balancesheet

• fix an infinite loop (#393)

print

• in CSV output, fix and rename the transaction id field

register

• fix a sorting regression with --date2 (#326)

• --average/-A is now affected by --historical/-H

• added --cumulative flag for consistency

• in CSV output, include the transaction id and rename the total field (#391)

stats

• fixed an issue with ordering of include files

misc

• --pivot option added, groups postings by tag instead of account (#323) (Malte Brandy)

• --anon option added, obfuscates account names and descriptions (#265) (Brian Scott)

  (Only affects the hledger tool, for now.)

• try to clarify balance/register's various report modes,

  kinds of "balance" displayed, and related options and language.

• with multiple --change/--cumulative/--historical flags, use the last one instead of complaining

• don't add the "d" suffix when displaying day periods

• stack-ify extra/hledger-rewrite.hs

misc

• added GHC 8 support, dropped GHC 7.6 and 7.8 support.

  GHC 7.8 support could be restored with small code changes and a maintainer.

• a cabal.project file has been added (Moritz Kiefer)

• use hpack for maintaining cabal files (#371).

  Instead of editing cabal files directly, we now edit the less verbose and less redundant package.yaml files and let stack (or hpack) update the cabal files. We commit both the .yaml and .cabal files.

• clean up some old cabal flags

• tools/simplebench has been spun off as the quickbench package.

• add Appveyor CI builds, provide up-to-date binaries for Windows

• extra: add a bunch of CSV rules examples

docs

• the website is simpler, clearer, and more mobile-friendly.

  Docs are now collected on a single page and organised by type: getting started, reference, more.

• reference docs have been split into one manual for each executable and file format.

  This helps with maintenance and packaging and also should make it easier to see what's available and to read just what you need.

• manuals are now provided in html, plain text, man and info formats

  generated from the same source by a new Shake-based docs build system. (#292)

• versioned manuals are provided on the website, covering recent releases and the latest dev version (#385, #387)

• manuals are built in to the hledger executables, allowing easy offline reading on all platforms.

  PROG -h              shows PROG's command-line usage
  PROG --help          shows PROG's manual (fixed width)
  PROG --man           shows PROG's manual with man (formatted/paged)
  PROG --info          shows PROG's manual with info (hypertext)
  hledger help [TOPIC] shows any manual
  hledger man  [TOPIC] shows any manual with man
  hledger info [TOPIC] shows any manual with info
  

• the general and reporting options are now listed in all executable manuals.

  We assume any of them which are unsupported are harmlessly ignored.

• demo.hledger.org is using beancount's example journal.

  This is the somewhat realistic example journal from the beancount project, tweaked for hledger.

• minor copyedits (jungle-boogie)

cli

• parsing multiple input files is now robust.

  When multiple -f options are provided, we now parse each file individually rather than just concatenating them, so they can have different formats (#320). Note this also means that directives (like `Y` or `alias`) no longer carry over from one file to the next.

• -I has been added as the short flag for --ignore-assertions

  (this is different from Ledger's CLI, but useful for hledger-ui).

• parsing an argument-less --debug option is more robust

0.27 (2015/10/30)

Account aliases:

• Regular expression account aliases are now fast enough that you can use lots of them without slowing things down. They now take O(aliases x accounts) time, instead of O(aliases x transactions); also, regular expressions are no longer recompiled unnecessarily.

Documentation:

• Each hledger package now includes one or more man pages, generated from markdown by the mighty pandoc. Currently there are six: one for each main executable and each input file format. Currently these somewhat duplicate the manual on the website; this will be resolved somehow. (#282).

• The site is now built with hakyll-std, a generic hakyll script.

• hledger once again has a HCAR entry.

Tools:

• The hledger cabal files are now generated from package.yaml files by hpack, in principle, removing a lot of error-prone duplication and boilerplate. (In practice, both files are being updated manually for the moment, until hpack supports flags and conditional blocks.)

• Time/allocation and heap profiling is working again, and easier:

  • make quickprof-CMD generates a profile for CMD, which runs against one of the sample journals. (CMD must be one word, enclosing in double quotes isn't working here for some reason).

  • make quickheap-CMD generates a heap profile for CMD, in hledgerprof.ps, and tries to open it in a viewer (currently the mac-friendly "open" executable, so you may need to adjust this in the makefile). As with quickprof, CMD must be one word and runs against one of the sample journals.

  • make hledgerprof builds the hledgerprof executable used for time/allocation profiling. make hledgercov builds the hledgercov executable used for coverage reports.

• Travis CI now tests the build on each github push and announces status changes by email and on #hledger.

Journal format:

• Dates must now begin with a digit (not /, eg).

• The comment directive longer requires an end comment, and will extend to the end of the file(s) without it.

Command-line interface:

• Output (balance reports, register reports, print output etc.) containing wide characters, eg chinese/japanese/korean characters, should now align correctly, when viewed in apps and fonts that show wide characters as double width (#242).

• The argument for --depth or depth: must now be positive.

add:

• Journal entries are now written with all amounts explicit, to avoid losing price info (#283).

• Fixed a bug which sometimes (when the same letter pair was repeated) caused it not to pick the most similar past transaction for defaults.

balance:

• There is now a -V/--value flag to report current market value (as in Ledger). It converts all reported amounts using their "default market price". "Market price" is the new name for "historical prices", defined with the P directive. The default market price for a commodity is the most recent one found in the journal on or before the report end date.

  Unlike Ledger, hledger's -V uses only the market prices recorded with P directives; it does not use the "transaction prices" recorded as part of posting amounts (which are used by -B/--cost). Also, using both -B and -V at the same time is supported.

• Fixed a bug in amount normalization which caused amount styles (commodity symbol placement, decimal point character, etc.) to be lost in certain cases (#230, #276).

• The balance command's --format option can now adjust the rendering style of multi-commodity amounts, if you begin the format string with one of:

  %_  - renders amounts on multiple lines, bottom-aligned (the default)
  %^  - renders amounts on multiple lines, top-aligned
  %,  - renders amounts on one line, comma-separated
  

• The balance report's final total (and the line above it) now adapt themselves to a custom --format.

print:

• The --match option prints the journal entry that best matches a description (ie whose description field is most similar to the value given, and if there are several equally similar, the most recent). This was originally an add-on I used to guess account names for ledger-autosync. It's nice for quickly looking up a recent transaction from a guessed or partial description.

• print now always right-aligns the amounts in an entry, even when they are wider than 12 characters. (If there is a price, it's considered part of the amount for right-alignment.)

register:

• Amount columns now resize automatically, using more space if it's needed and available.

0.26 (2015/7/12)

Account aliases:

• Account aliases are once again non-regular-expression-based, by default. (#252)

  The regex account aliases added in 0.24 trip up people switching between hledger and Ledger. (Also they are currently slow).

  This change makes the old non-regex aliases the default; they are unsurprising, useful, and pretty close in functionality to Ledger's.

  The new regex aliases are still available; they must be enclosed in forward slashes. (Ledger effectively ignores these.)

Journal format:

• We now parse, and also print, journal entries with no postings, as proposed on the mail lists. These are not well-formed General Journal entries/transactions, but here is my rationale:

  • Ledger and beancount parse them
  • if they are parsed, they should be printed
  • they provide a convenient way to record (and report) non-transaction events
  • they permit more gradual introduction and learning of the concepts. So eg a beginner can keep a simple journal before learning about accounts and postings.

• Trailing whitespace after a comment directive is now ignored.

Command-line interface:

• The -f/file option may now be used multiple times. This is equivalent to concatenating the input files before running hledger. The add command adds entries to the first file specified.

Queries:

• real: (no argument) is now a synonym for real:1

• tag: now matches tag names with a regular expression, like most other queries

• empty: is no longer supported, as it overlaps a bit confusingly with amt:0. The --empty flag is still available.

• You can now match on pending status (#250)

  A transaction/posting status of ! (pending) was effectively equivalent to * (cleared). Now it's a separate state, not matched by --cleared. The new Ledger-compatible --pending flag matches it, and so does --uncleared.

  The relevant search query terms are now status:*, status:! and status: (the old status:1 and status:0 spellings are deprecated).

  Since we interpret --uncleared and status: as "any state except cleared", it's not currently possible to match things which are neither cleared nor pending.

activity:

• activity no longer excludes 0-amount postings by default.

add:

• Don't show quotes around the journal file path in the "Creating..." message, for consistency with the subsequent "Adding..." message.

balancesheet:

• Accounts beginning with "debt" or now also recognised as liabilities.

print:

• We now limit the display precision of inferred prices. (#262)

  When a transaction posts to two commodities without specifying the conversion price, we generate a price which makes it balance (cf https://hledger.org/hledger.html#prices). The print command showed this with full precision (so that manual calculations with the displayed numbers would look right), but this sometimes meant we showed 255 digits (when there are multiple postings in the commodity being priced, and the averaged unit price is an irrational number). In this case we now set the price's display precision to the sum of the (max) display precisions of the commodities involved. An example:

    hledgerdev -f- print
    <<<
    1/1
        c    C 10.00
        c    C 11.00
        d  D -320.00
    >>>
    2015/01/01
        c  C 10.00 @ D 15.2381
        c  C 11.00 @ D 15.2381
        d     D -320.00
  
    >>>=0
  

  There might still be cases where this will show more price decimal places than necessary.

• We now show inferred unit prices with at least 2 decimal places.

  When inferring prices, if the commodities involved have low display precisions, we don't do a good job of rendering accurate-looking unit prices. Eg if the journal doesn't use any decimal places, any inferred unit prices are also displayed with no decimal places, which makes them look wrong to the user. Now, we always give inferred unit prices a minimum display precision of 2, which helps a bit.

register:

• Postings with no amounts could give a runtime error in some obscure case, now fixed.

stats:

• stats now supports -o/--outputfile, like register/balance/print.

• An O(n^2) performance slowdown has been fixed, it's now much faster on large journals.

  +--------------------------------------++--------+--------+
  |                                      ||   0.25 |   0.26 |
  +======================================++========+========+
  | -f data/100x100x10.journal     stats ||   0.10 |   0.16 |
  | -f data/1000x1000x10.journal   stats ||   0.45 |   0.21 |
  | -f data/10000x1000x10.journal  stats ||  58.92 |   2.16 |
  +--------------------------------------++--------+--------+
  

Miscellaneous:

• The June 30 day span was not being rendered correctly; fixed. (#272)

• The bench script invoked by "cabal bench" or "stack bench" now runs some simple benchmarks.

  You can get more accurate benchmark times by running with --criterion. This will usually give much the same numbers and takes much longer.

  Or with --simplebench, it benchmarks whatever commands are configured in bench/default.bench. This mode uses the first "hledger" executable in $PATH.

• The deprecated shakespeare-text dependency has been removed more thoroughly.

0.25.1 (2015/4/29)

• timelog: support the description field (#247)

0.25 (2015/4/7)

• GHC 7.10 compatibility (#239)

• build with terminfo support on POSIX systems by default

  On non-windows systems, we now build with terminfo support by default, useful for detecting terminal width and other things.

  This requires the C curses dev libraries, which makes POSIX installation slightly harder; if it causes problems you can disable terminfo support with the new curses cabal flag, eg: cabal install -f-curses ... (or cabal might try this automatically, I'm not sure).

• register: use the full terminal width, respect COLUMNS, allow column width adjustment

  On POSIX systems, register now uses the full terminal width by default. Specifically, the output width is set from:

  1. a --width option
  2. or a COLUMNS environment variable (NB: not the same as a bash shell var)
  3. or on POSIX (non-windows) systems, the current terminal width
  4. or the default, 80 characters.

  Also, register's --width option now accepts an optional description column width following the overall width (--width WIDTH[,DESCWIDTH]). This also sets the account column width, since the available space (WIDTH-41) is divided up between these two columns. Here's a diagram:

    <--------------------------------- width (W) ---------------------------------->
    date (10)  description (D)       account (W-41-D)     amount (12)   balance (12)
    DDDDDDDDDD dddddddddddddddddddd  aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa  AAAAAAAAAAAA  AAAAAAAAAAAA
  

  Examples:

    $ hledger reg                 # use terminal width on posix
    $ hledger reg -w 100          # width 100, equal description/account widths
    $ hledger reg -w 100,40       # width 100, wider description
    $ hledger reg -w $COLUMNS,100 # terminal width and set description width
  

• balance: new -T/--row-total and -A/--average options

  In multicolumn balance reports, -T/--row-total now shows a row totals column and -A/--average shows a row averages column. This helps eg to see monthly average expenses (hledger bal ^expenses -MA).

  NB our use of -T deviates from Ledger's UI, where -T sets a custom final total expression.

• balance: -N is now short for --no-total

• balance: fix partially-visible totals row with --no-total

  A periodic (not using --cumulative or --historical) balance report with --no-total now hides the totals row properly.

• journal, csv: comment lines can also start with *

  As in Ledger. This means you can embed emacs org/outline-mode nodes in your journal file and manipulate it like an outline.

0.24.1 (2015/3/15)

• journal: fix balance accumulation across assertions (#195)

  A sequence of balance assertions asserting first one commodity, then another, then the first again, was not working.

• timelog: show hours with two decimal places instead of one (#237)

• in weekly reports, simplify week 52's heading like the others

• disallow trailing garbage in a number of parsers

  Trailing garbage is no longer ignored when parsing the following: balance --format option, register --width option, hledger-rewrite options, hledger add's inputs, CSV amounts, posting amounts, posting dates in tags.

• allow utf8-string-1 (fpco/stackage/#426)

0.24 (2014/12/25)

General:

• fix redundant compilation when cabal installing the hledger packages
• switch to Decimal for representing amounts (#118)
• report interval headings (eg in balance, register reports) are shown compactly when possible
• general speedups

Journal format:

• detect decimal point and digit groups more robustly (#196)
• check that transaction dates are followed by whitespace or newline
• check that dates use a consistent separator character
• balance assertions now are specific to a single commodity, like Ledger (#195)
• support multi-line comments using "comment", "end comment" directives, like Ledger

CSV format:

• reading CSV data from stdin now works better
• the rules file include directive is now relative to the current file's directory (#198)
• the original order of same-day transactions is now usually preserved (if the records appear to be in reverse date order, we reverse them before finally sorting by transaction date)
• CSV output is now built in to the balance, print, and register commands, controlled by -O/--output-format (and -o/--output-file, see below)

CLI:

• the --width and --debug options now require their argument (#149)
• when an option is repeated, the last value takes precedence (#219). This is helpful eg for customising your reporting command aliases on the fly.
• smart dates (used in -p/-b/-e/date:/date2:) now must use a consistent separator character, and must be parseable to the end
• output destination and format selection is now built in to the balance, print and register commands, controlled by -o/--output-file and -O/--output-format options. Notes:
  • -o - means stdout
  • an output file name suffix matching a supported format will also set the output format, unless overridden by --output-format
  • commands' supported output formats are listed in their command-line help. Two formats are currently available: txt (the default) and csv.
• balance assertions can be disabled with --ignore-assertions

Account aliases:

• all matching account aliases are now applied, not just one directive and one option
• account aliases now match by case insensitive regular expressions matching anywhere in the account name
• account aliases can replace multiple occurrences of the pattern within an account name
• an account alias replacement pattern can reference matched groups with \N

Queries:

• date:/date2: with a malformed date now reports an error instead of being ignored
• amt: now supports >= or <=
• clarify status: docs and behaviour; "*" is no longer a synonym for "1" (fixes #227)

balance:

• fix: in tree mode, --drop is ignored instead of showing empty account names
• a depth limit of 0 now shows summary items with account name "...", instead of an empty report (#206)
• in multicolumn balance reports, -E now also shows posting-less accounts with a non-zero balance during the period (in addition to showing leading & trailing empty columns)
• in multicolumn reports, multi-commodity amounts are rendered on one line for better layout (#186)
• multicolumn reports' title now includes the report span

register:

• runs faster with large output
• supports date2:, and date:/date2: combined with --date2, better (fixes #201, #221, #222)
• a depth limit of 0 now shows summary items (see balance)
• -A/--average now implies -E/--empty
• postings with multi-commodity amounts are now top-aligned, like Ledger

Extra commands:

• hledger-equity: fix end date in title; print closing entry too
• hledger-check-dates: added

0.23.3 (2014/9/12)

• allow text 1.2+ (#207)

0.23.2 (2014/5/8)

• register: also fix date sorting of postings (#184)

0.23.1 (2014/5/7)

• register: fix a refactoring-related regression that the tests missed: if transactions were not ordered by date in the journal, register could include postings before the report start date in the output. (#184)
• add: don't apply a default commodity to amounts on entry (#138)
• cli: options before the add-on command name are now also passed to it (#182)
• csv: allow the first name in a fields list to be empty (#178)
• csv: don't validate fields count in skipped lines (#177)

0.23 (2014/5/1)

Journal format:

• A # (hash) in column 0 is now also supported for starting a top-level journal comment, like Ledger.
• The "too many missing amounts" error now reminds about the 2-space rule.
• Fix: . (period) is no longer parsed as a valid amount.
• Fix: default commodity directives no longer limit the maximum display precision (#169).
• Fix: + before an amount is no longer parsed as part of the commodity (#181).

CLI:

• Command-line help cleanups, layout improvements.
• Descriptions are shown for known add-ons in the command list.
• Command aliases have been simplified.
• Add-ons can now have any of these file extensions: none, hs, lhs, pl, py, rb, rkt, sh, bat, com, exe.
• Add-ons are displayed without their file extensions when possible.
• Add-ons with the same name as a built-in command or alias are ignored.
• Fix: add-on detection and invocation now works on windows.
• Fix: add-ons with digits in the name are now found.
• Fix: add-on arguments containing a single quote now work.
• Fix: when -- is used to hide add-on options from the main program, it is no longer passed through as an add-on argument.

Queries:

• The currency/commodity query prefix (sym:) has been renamed to cur:.
• Currency/commodity queries are applied more strongly in register and balance reports, filtering out unwanted currencies entirely. Eg hledger balance cur:'$' now reports only the dollar amounts even if there are multi-currency transactions or postings.
• Amount queries like amt:N, amt:N, where N is not 0, now do an unsigned comparison of the amount and N. That is, they compare the absolute magnitude. To do a signed comparison instead, write N with its sign (eg amt:+N, amt:<+N, amt:>-N).
• Fix: amount queries no longer give false positives on multi-commodity amounts.

accounts:

• An accounts command has been added, similar to Ledger's, for listing account names in flat or hierarchical mode.

add:

• Tab completion now works at all prompts, and will insert the default if the input area is empty.
• Account and amount defaults are more robust and useful.
• Transactions may also be completed by the enter key, when there are no more default postings.
• Input prompts are displayed in a different colour when supported.

balance:

• Balance reports in flat mode now always show exclusive (subaccount-excluding) balances.
• Balance reports in flat mode with --depth now aggregate deeper accounts at the depth limit instead of excluding them.
• Multicolumn reports in flat mode now support --drop.
• Multicolumn balance reports can now show the account hierarchy with --tree.
• Multicolumn report start/end dates are adjusted to encompass the displayed report periods, so the first and last periods are "full" and comparable to the others.
• Fix: zero-balance leaf accounts below a non-zero-balance parent are no longer always shown (#170).
• Fix: multicolumn reports now support --date2 (cf #174).

balancesheet, cashflow, incomestatement:

• These commands now support --flat and --drop.

print:

• Tag queries (tag:) will now match a transaction if any of its postings match.

register:

• The --display option has been dropped. To see an accurate running total which includes the prior starting balance, use --historical/-H (like balance).
• With a report interval, report start/end dates are adjusted to encompass the displayed periods, so the first and last periods are "full" and comparable to the others.
• Fix: --date2 now works with report intervals (fixes #174).

Miscellaneous:

• Default report dates now derive from the secondary dates when --date2 is in effect.
• Default report dates now notice any posting dates outside the transaction dates' span.
• Debug output improvements.
• New add-on example: extra/hledger-rewrite.hs, adds postings to matched entries.
• Compatible with GHC 7.2 (#155) - GHC 7.8, shakespeare 2

0.22.2 (2014/4/16)

• display years before 1000 with four digits, not three
• avoid pretty-show to build with GHC < 7.4
• allow text 1.1, drop data-pprint to build with GHC 7.8.x

0.22.1 (2014/1/6) and older: see https://hledger.org/release-notes or doc/release-notes.md.