Plain text accounting

• The tool is the oracle. hledger 1.52, Ledger 3.4 and Beancount 3.2 parse, balance, value and check; every figure in a document of the plugin's is the tool's, as the tool writes it. Kalem has no engine of its own for the journals (the owner's decision of 2026-10-11, the plugin's PT12).
• The highlighter is the plugin's own: one base syntax for what the three share (dates, statuses, descriptions, accounts, amounts and commodities, costs, lots, balance assertions, comments and tags, periodic and automated transactions, directives), with hledger, Ledger and Beancount over it, and hledger's CSV rules beside them. A tag is colored only where the tool reads one.
• The servers, where installed, give completion, hover, definition, references and rename: hledger-lsp (ptimoney's or juev's) and beancount-language-server. Ledger has none. Their diagnostics are theirs; the Check document is the tool's word.

Files	Language
.journal, .hledger, .j, .hledger.journal	hledger
.ledger, .ldg	Ledger
.beancount, .bean	Beancount
.rules	hledger's CSV rules

.dat is not claimed. Journals in Org's source blocks and Markdown's fenced blocks (hledger, ledger, beancount) are highlighted the same.

A journal that includes others is checked and reported as one. The setting journal names the main journal; without it, an hledger journal's is the one LEDGER_FILE names when that one includes the file (hledger files, asked once until a journal is saved), a Beancount journal's the one its server is told, else the file itself. The setting tool reads a .ledger file with Ledger where it is installed and with hledger where only hledger is. The journal's folder must be one of Kalem's projects: a plugin's programs run there. The status bar item names the tool and the main journal (hledger · 2026.journal · ✓), and the program running while one runs.

Each report is a document of the plugin's (documents), written again when the journal is saved; ? in it lists its keys, q or Escape closes it.

• Check (SPC m k; on each save): the tool's strictest check (hledger check --strict, ledger --pedantic --explicit balance, bean-check), each problem with its place and the lines the tool quoted; Enter opens the place.
• Balance (SPC m b): assets, liabilities and equity at the period's end, then the rest within the period, as a tree that folds; p the period, d the depth, v market values (hledger's -V --infer-market-prices, Ledger's -V, Beancount's value()). Beancount's tree is one bean-query a level, run side by side.
• Register (SPC m g r, Enter in the Balance): an account's postings with the tool's running total, which within a period stays the account's balance (hledger's -H, Ledger's -d, Beancount's opening balances); the last 2,000; Enter opens the posting.
• Reconcile (SPC m R): the cleared, pending and joint totals, the statement's balance typed and the difference, the postings not cleared; with a statement paired (SPC m r in its CSV file), each posting said to be on it or not, and its lines with no posting.
• Report… (SPC m r, from 0.2.0): the tool's other reports (cash flow, income statement, budget, forecast, statistics, lists, print, Beancount's saved queries) as the tool prints them.
• Import (SPC m i in a CSV statement): hledger's dry run through the statement's rules (offered from its header row when it has none), or Ledger's convert; i imports it.

Each command is one undo step, and changes only what it names.

Keys (Vim's command mode)	Command	The edit
SPC m a	New Transaction	the payee's last transaction as the tool drafts it (hledger print --match, ledger xact), dated, at its date's place
SPC m t	Toggle Status	unmarked, !, * (Beancount's txn, !, *) after the date
SPC m y	Copy Transaction	the transaction again, dated today
SPC m d	Delete Transaction	its lines, with its comment lines above and a blank line
SPC m =	Align Amounts	only the blanks between an account and its amount, at the column amount_column (52)
SPC m s	Sort Transactions	the transactions by date, each with its comments; refused across a scoping directive
C in a Reconcile	Finish Reconciliation	the pending marks cleared, a balance assertion written for the target
SPC m p	Fetch Prices	the price program's prices appended (pricehist, bean-price)

The keys are Doom Emacs's :lang ledger where it has them; [[ and ]] move between transactions. In the Word-like profile the commands are in the Journal menu and the palette, and Enter on a posting aligns it first.

The tool's own writing where it writes (hledger's import appends to the journal itself); otherwise the plugin's edits only, as the table says. Amounts the plugin writes take the journal's style (its commodities' sides, decimal marks and digit groups, read from the tool's JSON). Align Amounts is tested to change no byte but blanks on every corpus file, the tool reading each as before. Format Document (and saving with editor.format_on_save on) is Align Amounts over the whole journal, the plugin's formatter (plugin API 0.2.16); in a Beancount journal the server's formatting comes first when it runs. ptimoney's hledger-lsp 0.7.0 formats a journal into one that means something else, so the plugin leaves its formatting unused (servers.hledger-lsp.ignore).

• The servers, measured on the corpus: the plugin's README has the table (completion, hover, rename, diagnostics and formatting of each).
• hledger does not read Ledger's value expressions ((-$132.00)); a .ledger file goes to Ledger where it is installed.
• ledger-mode's reconcile buffer marks a posting where Space is pressed; a plugin's command edits only the document it runs in, so postings are marked in the journal (SPC m t) and the Reconcile document follows on save.

Beancount's import (the user's beangulp script, which would need python3 among the programs the plugin may run); hledger and beancount source blocks run by Babel; the Reconcile document beside the journal in a pane of its own; marking a posting from the Reconcile document.

The tool reads the whole journal for each call, which runs beside the editor. On 200,000 transactions over ten files (the plugin's tests/large.rs) hledger takes some 8 to 10 s of a processor a call, Ledger 1 to 3 s, Beancount some 7 s a query. Kalem takes at most 16 MB of a program's output: past it, a report is refused with a notice naming a shorter period, never shown cut (hledger's JSON register, some 1.3 KB a posting, passes it beyond about 12,000 postings in the period). The servers' first completion on that journal: 4.5 s (juev's hledger-lsp) to 13 s.

plugins/pta in getkalem/plugins: plugin.json and syntaxes/ (the language half), src/ (the component and the parsers of each tool's output), corpus/ (one journal per dialect, error files, a statement with its rules). cargo test -p kalem-plugin-pta runs the conformance test, the syntaxes against the tools, the tools' checks, balances, registers, reconciliation, import and prices on the corpus (a tool not installed skipped with a note), the servers where installed, and the parsers on recorded output.