Ledger file formatting tool about hledger HOT 3 CLOSED

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.

from hledger.

from hledger.

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

from hledger.