hledger/hledger/Hledger/Cli/Commands/Help.md

1.4 KiB

help

Show the hledger user manual in the terminal, with info, man, or a pager. With a TOPIC argument, open it at that topic if possible. TOPIC can be any heading in the manual, or a heading prefix, case insensitive. Eg: commands, print, forecast, journal, amount, "auto postings".

_FLAGS

This command shows the hledger manual built in to your hledger version. It can be useful when offline, or when you prefer the terminal to a web browser, or when the appropriate hledger manual or viewing tools are not installed on your system.

By default it chooses the best viewer found in PATH, trying (in this order): `info`, `man`, `PAGER,less,more. You can force the use of info, man, or a pager with the-i,-m, or-p` flags, If no viewer can be found, or the command is run non-interactively, it just prints the manual to stdout.

If using info, note that version 6 or greater is needed for TOPIC lookup. If you are on mac you will likely have info 4.8, and should consider installing a newer version, eg with brew install texinfo (#1770).

Examples

$ hledger help --help      # show how the help command works
$ hledger help             # show the hledger manual with info, man or $PAGER
$ hledger help journal     # show the journal topic in the hledger manual
$ hledger help -m journal  # show it with man, even if info is installed