A User's view of Hledger

Learning about hledger

First look at tldr pages in hledger

One of the advantages of my recent upgrade to hledger version 1.34 is that I now have access to the tldr pages. I had delayed upgrading as I was afraid of losing access to iadd, which I had finally regained through the build with hledger-install process. https://hledger.org/install.html#build-with-hledger-install

However, I wanted to upgrade to hledger 1.34, but for some reason hledger-install was not doing the trick. So, I decided to try an upgrade through brew. My thinking was if the brew upgrade were to knock out iadd, then I could look more at hledger-install (meaning ask for help from the developers!).

In spite of my fears, brew installed 1.34 without affecting iadd in the least.

So, on to tldr.

The idea of tldr is simple. You use this if you want to Goldilocks version of the documentation: not too long and not too short.

When you get the tldr notes, they have about one screen of information. So, not so long to bog down in all the details, but long enough to give some of the more common uses.

Here is an example that I tried for the areg command:

hledger aregester --tldr

The above command output:

/bin/sh: tldr: command not found
Could not run tldr, using fallback viewer:

hledger aregister

Show the transactions and running balances in one account, with each transaction on one line.
More information: https://hledger.org/hledger.html#aregister.

  • Show transactions and running balance in the assets:bank:checking account:

hledger aregister assets:bank:checking

  • Show transactions and running balance in the first account named *savings*:

hledger aregister savings

  • Show the checking account's cleared transactions, with a specified width:

hledger aregister checking --cleared --width {{120}}

  • Show the checking register, including transactions from forecast rules:

hledger aregister checking --forecast

There was a message about not being able to run tldr and using a fallback viewer instead, but it didn’t seem to be a problem with noteworthy consequences as I still saw the tldr notes.

And that’s a good place to stop. I will note, however, for the sake of completeness that I did install the tldr viewer, but for whatever reason it was showing me random non-hledger tldr pages rather than the hledger tldr pages that I requested. So, I uninstalled tldr. The “fallback viewer” seems to work just fine, so that’s what I am sticking with for the moment.