Thanks for explaining. My thinking was: by (optionally?) allowing the usual extra characters (#!python3 -> #!/usr/bin/env python3) it remains standard, avoiding an unnecessary roadblock for existing scripts and programmer workflows.
PS: I also like your shorter syntax and would be happy if it became a cross platform standard - Shebang 2.0..
The linked Tour is part of the documentation, which at a glance looks extremely extensive. You mention some issues; are you saying these docs are too hard to discover and lacking a good-enough TOC or index ?
> I mean I want to log income, spendings, exchanges in multiple currencies (or commodities), and then be able to see reports in a single currency -
All the major PTA tools support this - perhaps the chat could help ?
> my net worth, my income over period of time, capital gains / losses.
The first two are easy, the third is more complicated but also possible - unrealized gains at least, I forget how easy realized gains are in the various tools, it might not be fully automatic.
Another advantage over spreadsheets I forgot: more guide rails and more common ground (shared practices, howtos, support) with other users. Spreadsheets are a tabular report construction kit, PTA is an accounting system construction kit.
PS a little daily-ish data-entry-and-reconciling ritual, with a pleasant tool setup, can be quite satisfying! I actually look forward to it. (That right there is part of my PTA success story. I used to suffer a lot of stress around all things finance.)
ledger-mode in Emacs has some excellent account and description auto-completion (warning, may require a bit of configuration to suit your taste).
hledger add, hledger-iadd and hledger-web are some of the data entry uis with auto completion.
Alternatives: other ways of generating entries means less manual data entry, such as copy/paste in your editor, predefined templates (org-capture, yasnippet or equivalents), or conversion from bank csv data.
[PS I realize now you were asking for more than account name auto-completion, ie: filling in defaults for all postings (legs) when you reuse a transaction description. I don't know of many PTA tools doing this yet; hledger add is one.]
- https://github.com/martinvonz/jj
- https://pijul.org