Feature Request: Command aliases

[Pranshugoyal]

For recurring reports like monthly expenses or total taxable income over a financial year the way to go is to create a shell alias or function and provide it the time period while invoking.

It would be great if ledger could provide an alias creation feature like git or hg. That way the syntax of aliases and regular commands becomes consistent. If implemented well the feature may lend itself to also make it easy to create aliases for complex reports.

[afh]

Interesting suggestion, thanks, @Pranshugoyal 🙏

[igbanam]

Another reason I just bumped into which brought me searching for this is… assuming a complex ¹ ledger where you finally figure out (through trial and error) the perfect options soup for the report you've wanted. It would be amazing to alias this report to something memorable.

Footnotes

1. "complex" for me was trying to find my largest spend in a certain currency using a ledger with multiple currencies and commodities which convert magically™ ↩

[octvs]

Couldn't agree more. I use a wrapper script:

#!/bin/sh

ledgerBin="${LEDGERBIN:-.unwrapped-ledger}"
ledgerFile="${LEDGERFILE:-$HOME/notes/ledger/postings.ledger}"

get_flags() {
	# Get flags for each preset report
	case "$1" in
	"daily") echo "daily --budget --period this month -l \"not (payee =~ /Monthly Budget/)\"" ;;
	"net") echo "not ^equity and not ^expenses and not ^income and not ^funds" ;;
	"status") echo "not ^equity and not ^expenses and not ^income" ;;
	esac
}

cmd="$ledgerBin"
case "$1" in
"edit")
	cmd="$EDITOR $ledgerFile" && shift
	;;
"reg" | "register" | "bal" | "balance")
	if [ "$2" = "daily" ] || [ "$2" = "net" ] || [ "$2" = "status" ]; then
		cmd="$cmd $1 $(get_flags "$2")" && shift 2
	fi
	;;
"net" | "status")
	cmd="ledger bal $1" && shift
	;;
"daily")
	cmd="ledger reg daily" && shift
	;;
"report")
	cmd="LEDGER_TERM='qt size 1280,720 persist' ledger-report" && shift
	# If set to a preset report grab the flags from there
	if [ "$1" = "net" ] || [ "$1" = "status" ]; then
		cmd="$cmd register $(get_flags "$1") -J" && shift
	fi
	;;
"watch")
	cmd="ls $ledgerFile | PAGER=cat entr -c ledger" && shift
	;;
esac

# {*@Q} args as it is, refer to bash manual 3.5.3 Shell Parameter Expansion
eval "$cmd ${*@Q}"

With which you sacrifice shell completion for of preset flags convenience.

[igbanam]

Just thought of a workaround for this. Since ledger doesn't care about the position of options, you could have terminal aliases which spell out the query you want

alias lb = ledger bal
alias lir = ledger bal ^inc ^exp --market
alias lnw = ledger bal ^ass ^liab --market --depth 2

Then you can use like so

$ lnw -f /path/to/transactions.journal

This way, you should still have completions