Help.txt

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