An Emacs major mode for Hledger

github.com

31 points·sriharis··5 comments

Ledger and the accompanying Emacs major mode are both written and maintained by Emacs maintainer John Wiegley. I use both to manage my finances. I'd love to hear about Hledger though; can someone tell me why I might switch to using this?

hledger is mostly compatible with ledger. It's fairly mature and has been around for a long time.

They have a comparison on their site:

https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/wiki/FAQ#features

It also has a nice web interface out of the box:

http://hledger.org/hledger-web.html

The author of hledger is also behind the plain text accounting site:

https://plaintextaccounting.org/

For me, the primary benefit is I could build hledger but not ledger. I don't know if they've fixed it, but building ledger was not easy.

If you don't know hledger I highly recommend this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjoCNRpLanY (Conquering Your Finances with Emacs and Ledger)

This my first time seeing Hledger let alone the Emacs integration so thanks for posting this. I've previously used and.co for tracking work, costs and invoicing for some simple contract work but the idea of having a plain text alternative that I can work in Emacs with is worth investigating.

There is also ledger which already has an emacs mode. I'm not sure what the advantages of hledger are.

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