This package provides beancount-mode
an Emacs major-mode
implementing syntax highlighting, indentation, completion , and other
facilities to edit and work with Beancount ledger files.
To instruct Emacs to activate beancount-mode
when opening files with
a .beancount
extension, you can add this code to your Emacs
configuration, typically in the ~/.emacs.d/init.el
file:
(add-to-list 'load-path "/path/to/beancount-mode/")
(require 'beancount)
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.beancount\\'" . beancount-mode))
Most facilities commonly provided by Emacs major modes are implemented
by beancount-mode
. Documentation on the provided functionality and on
the default keybindings can be obtained with the describe-mode
command
in a buffer with beancount-mode
active.
In a nutshell, when beancount-mode
is active:
- The “TAB” key either indents, completes, or folds the heading at point, depending on the context.
- Amounts in postings are indented so that the decimal point is at the
beancount-number-alignment-column
column. Setting this variable to 0 will cause the alignment column to be determined from file content. - Postings in transactions, as well as metadata, links, and tags
following directives, and are indented with
beancount-transaction-indent
spaces. - Pressing the “RET” key causes the current line to be automatically indented. If the current line is a posting, the amount will be indented as described above.
The automatic indentation behavior is defined by Emacs auto indent
mechanism, however, it can be surprising or undesired. It can be
disabled setting electric-indent-chars
to nil
after loading
beancount-mode
, for example like this:
(add-hook 'beancount-mode-hook
(lambda () (setq-local electric-indent-chars nil)))
Beancount ledger files can grow very large. It is thus often practical
to structure them in sections and subsections. To support this,
beancount-mode
leverages Outline minor-mode to enable navigation of
the document structure to fold and unfold the document sections,
similarly to what is possible in Org mode. Lines starting with one
asterisks ”*
” or three or more semicolons ”;;;
” are interpreted as
section headings. In Beancount, the semicolon starts a comment and all
lines starting with an asterisks are ignored. The number of semicolons
or asterisks determines the heading level.
To enable this functionality, outline-minor-mode
should be
explicitly activated. It is possible to do so automatically when
beancout-mode
is activated:
(add-hook 'beancount-mode-hook #'outline-minor-mode)
Outline minor mode uses a rather peculiar choice of keybindings. It is
possible to map the most used functionality to keys more familiar to
org-mode
users adding a few lines to the Emacs configuration:
(define-key beancount-mode-map (kbd "C-c C-n") #'outline-next-visible-heading)
(define-key beancount-mode-map (kbd "C-c C-p") #'outline-previous-visible-heading)
Alternatively the keybindings for outline-minor-mode
can be globally
remapped. Please refer to the outline-minor-mode
documentation in
the Emacs manual for more details.
You can enable on-the-fly checks on your ledger file using bean-check
via
flymake:
(add-hook 'beancount-mode-hook #'flymake-bean-check-enable)
The etc/emacsrc
file contains some example configuration for
beancount-mode
and some experiments that may find their way into the
main codebase.