.ledger, .dat, and .journal, oh my?

[Holly Hudson]

I'm just starting out with this and I'm seeing examples of the register file with all kinds of file extensions.  Is there any difference between a .dat file, a .ledger file, and a .journal file?  I'm using the vim-ledger plugin, so my test files are all .ledger files right now so the syntax highlighting works. 

But also just to clear up my understanding of how ledger works from a big-picture perspective, the ledger command line tool simply takes in a (correctly formated) file of transactions, and shows you reports based on the arguments you pass in.  It doesn't create any auxillary files anywhere.  So when I download statements from my bank, I can parse them into a cleaned-up csv format, and then and then run "ledger convert" on the file and append the output to my ongoing .ledger file (or .dat, or .journal, or..??).  And that's that.  Right?  Or am I confused.

Thanks!!!

[Ismael Bouya]

Hi Holly,

Yes, you’re right, only vim (or your favorite editor) cares about the
extension of the file, ledger only takes the file you give him.

For vim in particular, he doesn’t even "really" care about the name, you
can just put a "; vim: filetype=ledger" in the first or last line of
your file and it works the same :)

(Wed, Jun 05, 2019 at 04:32:12AM -0700) Holly Hudson :

--
Ismael

[Holly Hudson]

Thank you!!!