A User's view of Hledger

Learning about hledger

Emacs revert buffer stops working

One handy Emacs setting that has worked well for me is automatic buffer reversion. Specifically, it is inovoked by the following line that I have in my init file:

(global-auto-revert-mode 1)

How it works, is that whenever an hledger command changes the data in a file, the above setting automatically updates the corresponding buffer.

And it worked fine until about a week ago when it didn’t. Not sure why. I tried some fixes suggested on the internet, but I didn’t find anything that worked for me.

So, for the moment I am doing manual reversions. There are a few options to manually revert a buffer in Emacs: it can be run as a command in the minibuffer, you can select it from the menu, or you can use a shortcut. On my Mac, the shortcut for revert buffer is listed as s-u. That one stumped me. What is “s”? Turns out, it’s the command key.

If it were only the s-u shortcut that needed to be called, it would be only a very small hindrance. However, once I revert a buffer, it is no longer in ledger mode. And it is helpful to be back in ledger mode in order to use all the ledger specific commands, let alone view the useful color coding of ledger data. So, after I use s-u, I then run the ledger-mode command. Still not terrible, but now it’s two steps for each account that I reconcile, where previously (i.e., before auto-revert stopped working) it was zero steps.

As a result, I am motivated to keep looking to see how I can get auto-revert to work again. I will let you know what I find.