Ledger file formatting tool

[danihodovic]

I've tried to search the manual and Github for tools that automatically format ledger files (similar to Black for Python or gofmt for Go). I write my ledger file in vim and it ends up with inconsistent formatting, especially between the account and amount which vary for each transaction.

Does a command to format files already exist? If not, how difficult would it be to write?

[simonmichael]

I think the situation is this:

1. In the PTA world, only the PTA tools themselves can fully parse their own formats, and they usually have a command for outputting the same format (like print). But none of them does this perfectly, eg hledger print is good at preserving everything within a transaction, but it doesn't preserve directives or inter-transaction comments, so you have to work around that.
2. There are some editor/IDE addons which can parse and reformat PTA data files. These parse more superficially, and are less strict with their formatting, but they are probably better at preserving data. ledger-mode in Emacs (M-q key), VS Code extensions like hledger-vscode, ledger, and Beancount, and probably some vim addons are some of these.

[danihodovic]

hledger print does seem to preserve comments which is great, but doesn't format the amounts for transactions consistently

2024-05-31 Manually added fees
    Expenses:Bank:Fees        EUR14.25
    Assets:Bank                  EUR-14.25

2024-06-01 Ice cream
    ; :-)
    Expenses:Ice Cream         EUR2.20
    Assets:Bank                    EUR-8.09

[simonmichael]

I can't reproduce your example, but the current general behaviour of hledger print is: it right-aligns the amounts, separately within each transaction. It doesn't align them across all transactions; ledger-mode is good for that.