Three programs help hledger work even better for me. First, is Emacs. Or, should I say, Emacs running in ledger-mode. With ledger-mode running, I make frequent use of the ledger-mode-clean-buffer command. This command sorts the transactions by date and, at the same time, removes unneeded blank lines, and aligns the indentations. In other words, it’s like having Mary Poppins come into a messy room and making the disorder magically disappear. Except it happens in my hledger data file.
The second program is Warp, which helps in general for any command line work. It has multiple tabs, useful if you have different categories of command line work. For example, you can have one tab open for your plain text accounting work and another tab for some programming work you are doing. I also like that when I type the first letter in a command, Warp offers a recent command I have used beginning with that same letter. If that’s the command I want, or something very close to it, I can press the right arrow to get the whole command, which I can then enter or edit.
The third program is hledger-iadd, which I often use instead of the built-in hledger-add command. Both hledger-add and hledger-iadd are for interactively adding transactions, which is the way I add the bulk of my transactions. While each program has its strengths, I find myself using hledger-iadd most of the time.
One program I haven’t started to use, but which I have heard good things about is Just for command line work. If this ever moves from my “I should try this sometime” list to actually working with it, I’ll let you know my experiences with it.