Sometimes it’s useful to have fake hledger data. For example, if I am creating an instructional video for hledger, I want to show pretend data rather than my real transactions.
Creating such imaginary hledger transactions is a bit tedious, at least for me. So, it seemed like a good excuse to write an R program to do the work instead.
The idea is that the program will generate random transactions. Well, not exactly random transactions. For example, the date will be one in a certain time period, such as this year or last year. The revenue and expense categories will be randomly selected from a given list. Similarly, the payee/description line will come from a list of payees.
I envision that when finished I will have a program that can generate, say, 25 transactions with one command.
I am still only at the beginning stages of the R program to do the above. As I make further progress on it, I will update in this space. But it’s fun to work on the R program in the meantime.
A non-review of hledger-mode for Emacs
At one point in the recent past I hoped to do an in-depth review comparing two modes for Emacs: hledger-mode ledger-mode. These are add-ons that help Emacs users work with ledger/hledger files. I am a regular user of ledger-mode. Several years ago I tried hledger-mode, but shortly after changed to ledger-mode and have stuck with it.
So, I decided to get hledger-mode working again with Emacs. I succeeded but quickly realized that it was going to take several hours of work with hledger mode to come up with a worthwhile comparison. Both programs have a large number of features, and even with ledger-mode, the one I currently use, I use just a few commands. So, to compare the two modes comprehensively, I would want to look at the available commands of both, which is quite a long list. The upshot of all this is that I will not be planning to compare ledger-mode and hledger-mode anytime soon.