ledgerkit-editor

A keyboard-driven terminal editor for hledger plain-text accounting journals.

Early beta — use with caution. This software is under active development and may corrupt your journal files. Always keep a backup before editing. Do not use on irreplaceable data without a recovery plan.

Built with Textual and ledgerkit.

Features

• Full-screen text editor with hledger syntax highlighting (dates, payees, accounts, amounts, commodities, comments, directives — including P price directives, field-by-field)
• Monokai Pro default theme; runtime theme switching supported
• Incremental search with match highlighting (Ctrl+F, Shift+PgUp/Down, Ctrl+C to copy the current match)
• View filter — show all / cleared-only / unreconciled-only transactions (Ctrl+L)
• Transaction block selection and duplication (Ctrl+T, Ctrl+G)
• Cleared status toggle — single transaction (3-state cycle) and bulk selection (Ctrl+R)
• Insert today's date at cursor (Ctrl+D)
• Date shifting with Shift+Up / Shift+Down (cursor-position-aware; works on transaction headers and P price directives; expands an unpadded date like 2026-9-1 to 2026-09-01 on first use)
• Save with date-sort and whitespace re-alignment (Ctrl+S)
• Undo / Redo (Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y)
• Command palette (Ctrl+P)

Planned / In Progress

See ROADMAP.md for the full, current status — it's the source of truth this section summarizes, not the other way around.

• Transaction filter (Ctrl+O) with smart dates and regex — implemented on the unreleased release/1.1.0 branch; the latest PyPI release still has only the UI stub (criteria filtering not yet active)
• Tab autocomplete for account/payee names — also on release/1.1.0, unreleased
• Alt+P / Alt+N transaction templates, month/year date-shift modifiers, large-journal performance — not yet started

No side-panel features (account balance tree, transaction register, reconciliation mode) are currently planned — they existed pre-v0.8.0 and were removed; see ROADMAP.md's "Window Panes" note.

Installation

From PyPI

pip install ledgerkit-editor
ledgerkit-editor path/to/my.journal

Development setup

git clone https://github.com/ctosullivan/ledgerkit-editor.git
cd ledgerkit-editor

python -m venv .venv
.venv\Scripts\activate        # Windows
# source .venv/bin/activate   # macOS / Linux

pip install --upgrade pip
pip install -e ".[dev]"

# Run tests
pytest --tb=short

# Launch
ledgerkit-editor path/to/my.journal

Journal File Resolution

The editor resolves the journal file in this order:

1. Path passed as a command-line argument
2. $LEDGER_FILE environment variable
3. ~/.hledger.journal default
4. Interactive prompt on launch (if none of the above resolve)

Keyboard Shortcuts

See docs/shortcuts.md for the full reference.

Requirements

• Python 3.9+
• textual 8.2.5
• ledgerkit 1.0.0.dev1

Development

See CONTRIBUTING.md for setup instructions and the ledgerkit dependency update workflow.

Roadmap

See ROADMAP.md for planned features and current development status.

This repository was previously named PyLedger-editor. GitHub redirects old URLs automatically.