News

This Week In Hledger 2023-12-01

Share your hledger/PTA user notes, dev news, achievements or experiences in the hledger matrix chat, every Friday morning (or any time, tagged with "TWIH").

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Dev

Added easy tagged time logging to timedot format, using letters instead of dots.

Ops

Update the stars.hledger.org redirect (we have reached the top 30 Haskell projects by github stars 🌟 🎉).

Docs

Use cli class instead of shell for all command-line examples in hledger docs.

hledger: Amount formatting, parseability

Ledger: interoperating tips updates, more about commodity directives and balance assertions.

Videos: reorder hledger fan videos.

REGRESSIONS: cleanups, discuss real names.

Other

Prepared change notes and released hledger 1.32 with the last quarter's changes.

I did a big cleanup on plaintextaccounting.org, which has absorbed the wiki and now supports Obsidian-style wiki links and clickable headings.

Two things in this week's hledger fan blog. First, for beginners, some notes on reducing errors when reconciling accounts. Second, for the more advanced, a recommendation for an Awk programming book. See the details at https://hledgerfan.com/fewer-errors-in-reconciling/.

Quotes of the week

It's the basis of my entire personal finance system.

once again, I was deeply impressed by how useful hledger is, and how thoughtful it is.

This Week In Hledger 2023-11-24

Share your hledger/PTA user notes, dev news, achievements or experiences in the hledger matrix chat, every Friday morning (or any time, tagged with "TWIH").

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Dev

Fixes:

Non-print-like reports no longer add trailing decimal marks (a regression in 1.31). Clarified the policy on number formatting adjustments made in certain reports/output formats. (#2115)
tag: queries now work when reading CSV files. (#2114)
-o/--outputfile with a .json or .sql extension now properly selects those formats.

Improvements/features:

The print command has a new beancount output format for exporting to Beancount.
Timedot format supports a new letters syntax for easier tagged time logging. (#2116)
Journal format now accepts lot costs with spaces after {, improving Ledger compatibility.

Docs

hledger: added "Amount formatting, parseability", updated "Decimal marks, digit group marks", "commodity directive", "CSV > if table", "Timedot".

Ledger: added more notes on commodity directives, from chat.

Checking for errors: added tips on enforcing account lifetimes, from reddit, and on minimising diffs in reports, from mail list.

Cookbook: added "Reporting version control stats".

Over at https://plaintextaccounting.org/#articles-blog-posts I started adding blog links for 2021-2023, including 10 33 hledger-related posts from Robert Nielsen, Jonathan Dowland, Arsen Arsenović, and Zoran Zaric.

Misc

Updated project finance scripts, regenerated the project ledger with consistent precisions in assertions, updated it with the last few months of data from Open Collective.

Robert Nielsen

On the theme of the recent Thanksgiving Day, here are three ways you can use hledger to be thankful: https://hledgerfan.com/using-hledger-for-thanksgiving/.

Quotes of the week

Have been taking care of my (new) records for almost two years now and this data is really valuable for me. Gives me very nice overview over everything and confidence that everything is alright and so on. Just looking at some graphs can make you feel really good - in terms of "I know whats happening", not necessarily in "all is well", depending on those actual numbers! 😆 --someone using Beancount

This Week In Hledger 2023-11-17

Every Friday morning (or any time, tagged with "TWIH"): share your hledger/plain text accounting user notes, dev news, achievements or experiences in the hledger matrix chat.

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Dev

A new hledger user pointed out in chat out that -s/--strict mode didn't work with the import command. This exposed a bug (#2113) and led to some reworking of the API in Hledger.Read. Until now, when reading multiple files, -s/--strict checks were performed for each individual file, causing spurious failures, with import and other commands. Now strict checks are done only once, for the overall journal. Also, the import command now only updates .latest files at the end of a successful run (after successfully passing strict checks and after updating the journal file).

Post-"Precisiongeddon" followup: updating hledger-ui and hledger-web to show amounts with correct display precision.

Ops

Fixed a problem with cloudflare authentication that was preventing automatic TLS certificate renewal on hledger.org.

Clarified and documented my cloudflare tokens, and moved them to env vars so the latest caddy config could be committed.

Fixed the hledger.org webhook that was not updating the site on git push.

Enabled https for "code.hledger.org" and "site.hledger.org" short urls.

Fixed some caddy warnings, formatted the config file, added some caddy/webhook management scripts to the site makefile.

Docs

Spent some time drafting alternate hledger manual structures and thinking about adding a user guide.

Misc

Time breakdown this week: 52% enhancement, 35% cleanup, 13% support.

Robert Nielsen

On the hledger fan website, I discuss using the aregister and print commands to get narrow and wider views of your data: https://hledgerfan.com/zooming-out-and-in

Quotes of the week

Great software btw, I appreciate your work! Been poking around with PTA and hledger since I was laid off, and it's been incredible for managing/extending my runway 😁 I was a Mint/Personal Capital power user before, but this takes it to the next level. Got a new job and I've already forecasted out the whole next year, very handy and something I could never do before"

I spent some time trying to set up hledger so that I’d actually use it. With multiple accounts it really got tedious but I loved the actual double entry accounting and level of detail. My wife was blown away by the year end summary I made with it. You can see early how much went to taxes, fica etc etc.

I'm really happy how my hledger edit addon helps me quickly reconcile transactions. After CSV-importing from all different sources (phone notes, bank websites, etc.), I pile up the ridiculous amount of invoices and receipts next to me, grab one after the other and execute hledger edit amt:35.11 or hledger edit Checking desc:ALDI for example to find and edit the transaction in my $EDITOR, no matter where that txn was located originally. The other way round (going through the journal, then finding the physical invoice/receipt) turned out to be much slower.

I learned one thing: if %FIELDBAME REGEX matches against FIELDNAME in the CSV. I didn't know that! I always match against the whole line and am annoyed if the order of columns makes this weird

This Week In Hledger 2023-11-10

It's time for This Week In Hledger! Every Friday morning (or any time, tagged with "TWIH"), share your hledger/PTA user notes, dev news, achievements or experiences in the hledger matrix chat.

sm

Dev

This week I completed the months-long yak shave that became Precisiongeddon, and it has landed in master; see https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/pull/2111 for details. Heads up: this can change default precisions shown especially by cost and value reports - all for the better hopefully, but any pre-release testing is welcome. There's a linux binary at https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/actions/runs/6804488282.

CI (continuous integration) workflows on github have been optimised a bit:

Scheduled weekly builds have been disabled, as they were propagating to forks and running wastefully there in some cases.
Some repeated rebuilding of the hledger-lib and hledger packages that seems unnecessary has been stopped.
hledger-ui no longer builds its modules twice.
Haddock testing has been moved to the release workflows to save time.

Fixed:

amounts in value reports can sometimes be shown unstyled / with zero decimal digits, https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/issues/2105
auto postings break redundant equity/cost detection and transaction balancing, https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/issues/2110

My time log for the week shows 69% enhancement, 27% cleanup, 5% support.

Docs

As part of Precisiongeddon, I started expanding hledger's "code docs", in the Hledger module's haddock. I spent time learning how to navigate Haddock and producing a fast-feedback authoring workflow (make haddock-watch). And documented a bunch of "jargon" terms, and how we handle precision and display styles.

The "Regular expressions" manual section has been rewritten and now has examples: https://hledger.org/dev/hledger.html#regular-expressions.

Unmentioned last week: I added a News page on hledger.org as a stable home for This Week In Hledger and other news updates.

Misc

Some notable commits:

feat: cli: Add tsv output (#869) (Peter Sagerson)
feat: import: interpolate regex matches in field templates (#2009) (Jonathan Dowland)

There's new interest and design discussion for referencing the matched account name in auto postings, and I have added to lukasbestle's $20 bounty to make it $100: https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/issues/1975

Robert Nielsen

For more advanced hledger aficionados, here is a diagram showing just about every possible part of an hledger transaction: https://hledgerfan.com/almost-everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-hledger-transactions.

Quotes of the week

Overall very happy with hledger so far btw!

And thanks for the amazing tool. Migrating to hledger has been one of the most satisfying bits of digital homesteading I’ve done.

This Week In Hledger 2023-11-03

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Dev

tests: add outshine headings for folding/readability (in Emacs), readme updates, include .test files in TAGS, clean up ledger-compat tests
tools: bake dbgstrs - print a bunch of hledger debug messages for review
tools: ghci :rmain - like :main, but reloads first, useful eg when changing --debug level
WIP: imp: prices: fixes, clarify/improve semantics
WIP: precisiongeddon: precision/rounding cleanups/fixes/tests/docs, too intricate to describe

Continuing heavy work on consistent and optimal precision handling, and all the related yaks which keep showing up.

Seen

https://www.chvp.be/blog/nanoledger/ nice blog post introducing nanoledger android app

Robert Nielsen

Beginner's corner: What are the parts of a basic hledger transaction? Two resources for learners: https://hledgerfan.com/beginners-corner-a-basic-hledger-transaction

This Week In Hledger 2023-10-27

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Dev

demo: avoid a bug in asciinema 2.3.0, and improve the error message when asciinema fails (#2094)
web: fix broken "File format help" link in the edit form (#2103)
web: access control UX cleanups: replace --capabilities and --capabilities-header with --allow, and validate it before starting the app (#834)
web: refactor permission checking
web: sandstorm web app cleanups; rename/reorder roles & permissions
WIP: testing and improving amount style and precision handling in cost/value reports

Ops

Set up a self-hosted Sandstorm server and learned how to configure it.
Set up a public hledger-web instance in it: sandbox.hledger.org. Unlike https://demo.hledger.org, and until the spammers find it, sandbox is fully writable - use it as a pastebin for examples, eg.

Docs

Contemplating: merging cookbook and examples/*; something more custom to replace mdbook

Examples

hledger-report1: a custom compound report script, haskell and bash versions

Misc

exploring latest Paisa, and how to use it with existing setups

Seen

https://www.reddit.com/r/plaintextaccounting/comments/17g0026/average_cost_capital_gains_with_hledger very clear tutorial posts on (one way of) tracking investments
The primary reason Ledger was created was because it maintains the double-entry accounting equation for you: all accounts must balance. GUI tools never did this aggressively enough, all of them having some kind of feature like "check accounts" that would end up finding unaccountable pennies here or there. --John Wiegley, https://www.reddit.com/r/plaintextaccounting/comments/17fg4oi/why_plain_text_accounting_over_tools_like_excel/

chvp

A new Android app, NanoLedger, was added to F-droid to facilitate adding transactions on the fly. Payees, notes and accounts can all be autocompleted. Give it a try at https://f-droid.org/en/packages/be.chvp.nanoledger/

Robert Nielsen

Why I created the hledger fan YouTube channel: https://hledgerfan.com/why-i-created-the-hledger-fan-youtube-channel

This Week In Hledger 2023-10-20

G'day @room. It's time for This Week In Hledger ! Every Friday morning, if you have any user or dev news or experiences you'd like to share, post them in the hledger matrix chat (https://matrix.to/#/#hledger:matrix.org) as a message prefixed by "TWIH:". Markdown formatting and edits are welcome. On Saturday I'll publish on the hledger mail list and on mastodon.

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Changes merged this week include:

Dev

print: add --round option for more control of precisions (#2085)
balance-assigned amounts affect commodity styles again (#2091, regression in 1.30)
timedot: parse unitful quantities more accurately (#2096)
Jacob Weisz has updated the hledger-web app on Sandstorm (The amazing https://sandstorm.io cloud app platform that lets you set up free private hledger-web instances with a few clicks, check it out!)

Ops

renamed main CI workflow and branch to "ci"
updated and committed hledger.org's caddy config and short urls (redirects)
there's now an easy short url for trying out the hledger-web app on Sandstorm: https://sandstorm.hledger.org.

Docs

moved regression bounty info to https://hledger.org/REGRESSIONS.html
hledger manual > Journal > Commodity display style: rewritten
hledger manual > aregister, hledger-ui manual > Register screen: note how separately-dated postings get combined

Examples

justfile: forecast-import: show but don't consume future-dated forecast transactions

Robert Nielsen

https://hledgerfan.com/a-not-so-capital-idea-for-saving-time/ describes a timesaving tip for command line users. Specifically, when typing one of your account names, hledger "forgives" you if you don't match the capitalization of an account name.

This Week In Hledger 2023-10-13

[hey there @room - I'd like to get a regular This Week In Hledger started, along the lines of This Week in Matrix (TWIM) ... Having a regular news heartbeat like this, even a small one, will help build our community and momentum.]

Welcome to This Week In Hledger ! Every Friday morning, if you have any user or dev news or experiences you'd like to share, post them in the hledger matrix chat room as a message prefixed by "TWIH:". Markdown formatting welcome, edits welcome. On Saturday I'll publish on the hledger mail list and on mastodon. (Inspired by This Week In Matrix).