Ciao Daniele, first of all thanks a lot for your feedback.
On Thu, Jan 03, 2019 at 10:30:43AM +0100, Daniele Nicolodi wrote:
> I agree that ledger-mode provides some functionality that would be
> nice to have in beancount-mode and I started to work on some, however
> I'm far from fluent in Elisp and I don't have much free time to work
> on this right now.
[...]
> Time permitting the next thing I will look into is probably
> investigate a way to have beancount-mode work as a major mode in
> addition to a minor mode, but I haven't found another mode that does
> something similar to take inspiration from, and my Elisp knowledge is
> too scattered to know if that is really a possibility.
I'm in a similar situation, but I'll be happy to land a hand if you
start hacking around in that direction.
> Which functionalities do you miss the most in beancount-mode?
- completion: I'm not sure how that is supposed to work. beancount-tab
as a function works well for accounts and tags (but not metadata
key/values, apparently), but if I bind it to TAB I lose indentation,
whereas in ledger-mode the two seems to work well together. Maybe I'm
not using it right
- indentation: as above, is there a function to auto-indent the first
character of the current line at the right column that I'm not
finding? in ledger-mode that's TAB, similarly to what happens with
most other major modes for programming languages
- number alignment: I'm missing ledger-mode's equivalent of C-c C-q.
beancount-align-numbers is supposed to do that (well, I guess), but:
- it doesn't work on the current transaction by default, you have to
select it as a region first, which is time consuming; and
- is inconsistent across transactions: if you align numbers in
separate transactions your ledger will "wiggle" horizontally
there is bean-format for that, so I can use it and remap C-c C-q to
pipe the current transaction to it as an external filter, but it's
weird that such a basic function doesn't work out of the box so I
think I'm missing something
- highlighting: there's no highlighting of the current entry (usually a
transaction), arguably a very minor point, but annoying when you're
editing transactions with many postings/tags/metadata
All in all it's entirely possible this is just me using the mode
"wrong", or expecting it to do things it's not supposed to do, but it's
hard to tell.