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Multifarious musings from my meandering mind...

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Plain Text Accounting with Emacs โ€“ Part 3

My journey into using Hledger with Emacs to track my share investments continues. Last Time I looked at a way to track shares using a plain text file. Since then I have made some tweaks to my workflow as I gain more experience:

  • naming conventions that support multiple stock brokers
  • booking brokerage fees in a better way to support the Australian tax system.

Over the past month I was not overly impressed with my existing stock broker, which led me to explore other stock brokers that may offer a more reliable service at a cheaper rate. It is expensive to transfer stocks over to a new broker, so I decided to cap further investment at my current broker and instead make any new purchases at a different broker. This meant that I would need an account structure that lets me easily identify which share lots were purchased through which broker.

Plain Text Accounting with Emacs โ€“ Part 2

Following up from my previous article on using Emacs to maintain a plain-text ledger for use with plain text accounting software: I reconfigured my Doom Emacs to use the pre-packaged Ledger mode, and I can confirm that it is much nicer to use than the hledger mode I was using before. This could be because I hadnโ€™t set up the hledger-mode configuration properly, but with ledger-mode I find the autocompletion works much better, and the M-q keystroke can be used to nicely line up the amounts in a transaction.

Plain Text Accounting with Emacs

For a while I have been concerned that I havenโ€™t really been on top of my finances as well as I should be, and I decided to bite the bullet and do something about it. Iโ€™ve been looking to get much better visibility into my share portfolio, and make sure I track it properly so that if I sell any shares I can easily calculate captital gains and such at tax time. I am also keen to get a better idea of my spending patterns so that I can see where I may be wasting money.

Ergonomic Emacs

Recently I was wondering whether I should move on from Doom Emacs/Evil Mode and try a less opinionated setup based on more traditional key mappings. I was looking around for some sort of โ€œstarter kitโ€ that provides some basic features that I have grown accustomed to using Doom Emacs. Some of the options I looked at were:

  • Xah Leeโ€™s Sample Init File from his online tutorial. This is a name I have come across a number of times as I research Emacs, and I believe he also has a large collection of YouTube videos on the topic. The config is very basic, and doesnโ€™t include any packages. It would take some time for me to work out how to implement features such as syntax highlighting, completion, etc. which, while very educational, is a bigger time commitment than I can currently afford.

ZSA Voyager with Pro Red Switches

I have been so impressed with my ZSA Voyager keyboard that I decided to buy a second one that I could leave set up at work. That meant I needed to think about what configuration to order.

On my previous Voyager, I ordered it with the Choc Red 50g linear switches, which felt very smooth, but possibly a little on the heavy side for me. So, I decided to try swapping them out with some Ambient Twilight 35g silent linear switches. I love those switches with their light touch and soft padding at the bottom of their travel.

Japanese Electronic Dictionary XD-Z20000

Last time I talked about a science-related electronic dictionary that I bought in Japan. When I was there, I did a bit more research and discovered that I had rushed in too quickly and that there were other models that include more business and literature-related content that could be useful when studying Japanese. So, I purchased a second dictionary, the Casio XD-Z20000. So, how much of an upgrade was this compared to the scientific model XD-G9850? To answer this question, I listed out all the dictionaries, glossaries and encyclopedias from both models and put them in a table for comparison, which you can find below. It shows under which category each dictionary is found on the two devices. I didn โ€™t bother looking at the English Training Gym sections, as English is already my native tongue, and hence I think it would be of little benefit to analyse it.