I think all these tutorials and showcases showing CLI usage for plaintext accounting kinda miss the mark and ultimately hinders adoption. 99% of the times I interact with ledger is with the same 4 commands. The fact I have the ledger file open in emacs and use these commands from a keybind is what makes the experience great. Trust me, if you need to run some complicated analysis, (h)ledger has your back and you can find how to do it in the docs. Most of the time you don't so just go and start bookkeeping. You need your file populated to see any benefit, and they'll become obvious when you get there.
My brain quickly gets bored with any attempt to "track" myself, even if it's finance. If you're like that, I'd advise you to first make concrete how you're gonna use the result -- which report-commands you'll bind to keys, and how the reports are gonna influence your decisions. Only then start tracking.
I use hledger only for the things I want reports of (taxes, utilities etc split with spouse, money spent on specific hobbies, etc; not restaurants etc). Entering everything into ledger is mind-numbingly boring.
Outside of automatic git hooks for validation, I really only run hledger when reconciling balance with spouse or when reporting taxes.
Do you have a good guide to start that you could recommend? It sounds quite simple when you mention it, but every time I tried to get started with Ledger with or without emacs, it always seemed too much of an undertaking and stalled pretty early... if you have a good workflow to recommend, that would be very helpful.
You don't need a lot of commands to use Ledger successfully. 99% of the time, I only use one (`ledger bal`). The main thing is how to put stuff in your ledger file (and in fact, I devote most of the book to that). And, of course, the discipline to do it regularly (which I outsource to Beeminder).
