[Haskell-cafe] ANN: hledger 1.4

[Simon Michael]

Aloha! I'm pleased to announce hledger 1.4.

Thank you release contributors: Nicholas Niro, Hans-Peter Deifel, 
Jakub Zárybnický, Felix Yan, Mark Hansen, Christian G. Warden, 
Nissar Chababy and Peter Simons.

Also, if I haven't already mentioned it: this year hledger turns 10!
Here's the first commit, from January 27 2007:
https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/commit/85864b41 
We have come a way, but there is much yet to look forward to.
Onward and upward!

The next major release is scheduled for 2017/12/31.

What is hledger ?
-----------------

hledger (http://hledger.org) is an evolving, dependable, robust,
cross-platform program for tracking money, time, or any other
commodity, using double-entry accounting and a simple plain text file
format.  It is a haskell reimplementation of Ledger and the plain text
accounting concept, providing command-line, curses and web
interfaces. hledger aims to be a pleasant and practical tool for
personal, business or institutional finance and time tracking.

What's new ?
------------

The full release notes are at http://hledger.org/release-notes#hledger-1.4 .
Some highlights:

- Easy install script: we have a new installation method for the
hledger tools, intended to dodge common pitfalls and just-work more
often. Building on the stack team's install script, this bash script
is cross platform, uses cabal or stack, installs stack and GHC if
needed, and installs the latest release of all major hledger
packages. See http://hledger.org/download for details.

- More batteries included: most experimental addon commands formerly
shipped in bin/ are now built in and work out of the box.

- New commands: 
balancesheetequity (a balance sheet including equity), 
tags (list tags in use), 
import (detects new transactions in multiple input files and adds them
to the main journal, particularly useful with CSV downloads).

- Balance reports can be sorted by amount - makes those high expenses
easy to spot.

- CLI conveniences:
@ARGSFILE is expanded to the set of args/flags in ARGSFILE.
depth:2 or --depth=2 can be written as -2.

- Help improvements: reorganized docs page, a more useful commands
list, a smarter help command, --help and -h are the same again (by
popular demand),

Getting started
---------------

See http://hledger.org/download for all install methods.

To get the latest hledger release, you may need to build it yourself
using stack or cabal. But don't worry, this is.. getting quite painless.
The new hledger installer requires only bash and will install
everything you need in one step: the hledger tools in
$HOME/.local/bin/, and (if required) stack and GHC in $HOME/.stack/.
Run it like so:

$ curl -sSLO http://hledger.org/hledger-install.sh
$ less hledger-install.sh   # review script, for the security conscious
$ bash hledger-install.sh   # install the latest hledger tools

Ensure $HOME/.local/bin is in your $PATH. Now try some commands:

$ hledger -h            # quick help
$ hledger help          # list built-in manuals
$ hledger add           # record some transactions
$ hledger               # list available commands

Now perhaps work through the tutorial at http://hledger.org/step-by-step.html

Or review the fine documents, presentations etc. at http://hledger.org
and http://plaintextaccounting.org

Or say hello and ask questions in the #hledger IRC channel on Freenode:
http://irc.hledger.org

If you have been finding hledger useful, I invite you to become a 
sponsor or contributor to make it stronger.  Donate using one of the 
funding links on the home page, give feedback, report bugs, send 
pull requests, write about it, or help in some other way. 
Thanks for your support! I hope to meet you online.

-Simon