Purpose of Emacs beancount-query command

[Nathan Neff]

Hello - I'm new to beancount and have beancount-emacs

installed.

https://github.com/beancount/beancount-mode

There's a command M-x beancount-query - I thought that the program would

allow interactive queries or something from within emacs. 

Anyway, I'm not familiar with "compile" mode in Emacs but I suspect it allows

a compiler backend to run on a given file, and then show errors etc (similar to an IDE).

Am I correct that this is the purpose of the emacs beancount-query command?

If so, it seems that the command doesn't "re-compile" automatically if the underlying file

is changed. 

https://github.com/beancount/beancount-mode/blob/main/beancount.el#L877

Thanks,

--Nate

[Daniele Nicolodi]

On 21/02/2022 23:16, Nathan Neff wrote:
> There's a command M-x beancount-query - I thought that the program would
> allow interactive queries or something from within emacs.

The beanconunt-query command allows to run bean-query against the file
backing the current buffer. In a way it does exactly what you expect.

> Anyway, I'm not familiar with "compile" mode in Emacs but I suspect it
> allows a compiler backend to run on a given file, and then show errors etc
> (similar to an IDE).

compilation-mode is the mode used by Emacs to display compilation output
and offers facilities to jump to errors and warnings, to jump to the
file locations mentioned in those, and others.

It is used by the beancount-query command to report its output.

> Am I correct that this is the purpose of the emacs beancount-query command?

I don't understand what you mean by "this". In the sentence before you
write about compilation, but Beancount does not have the concept of
compiling a ledger into something. Thus I don't know what the answer to
this question may be.

> If so, it seems that the command doesn't "re-compile" automatically if
> the underlying file is changed.

No, it does not, regardless of what you mean by "re-compile". Watching
the file for changes to trigger recompilation or execution of external
tools is very likely to just cause to spin up a lot of process that are
destined to fail because the input files are incomplete or not in a
coherent state, thus this is generally a feature that in not implemented
in any Emacs mode. beancount-mode adheres to this philosophy.

Cheers,
Dan