Usability suggestion

[Boris Goldowsky]

My wife and I have been happy Gnucash users for a couple of years now.  
Recently did the upgrade to 1.7.8 and are very happy with the new 
functionality.  Here's one small point that would make it more 
efficient and pleasurable to use:

When entering a pile of receipts, it's convenient to be able to do do 
everything with the keyboard rather than having to switch back and 
forth to the mouse.  For the most part this works fine; tabbing between 
fields, return to enter each transaction, and the auto-completion makes 
things very quick.

There's a problem with split transactions, though, and it has gotten 
worse between 1.6.x and 1.7.x.  Say you have a common type of split 
transaction, but which is not identical each time:  a grocery store 
perhaps, typically split between food & housewares.  You enter the 
date, tab, enter "stop n shop", tab, and completion gives you a split 
transaction and you end up in the $$ column; so you enter the total 
amount of the receipt.

So far so good.  But how then can you then fix up the amounts of the 
splits?  Tab and Return both pop up an error dialog box because the 
transaction is not balanced.  There doesn't seem to be any way to get 
to the logical next step, which is opening the split and fixing the 
subtotals, short of finding the menu item or toolbar icon with the 
mouse.  In 1.6.x, you could type Control-S to open the splits, but that 
no longer works in 1.7.x: you get Save File instead.

So two questions: short term - is there a keyboard shortcut for 
open/close splits?  Is it documented somewhere?

Longer term - the user interface aspects of splits seem to be one of 
the roughest spots in an otherwise polished interface.  It would be 
very nice if the splits would open automatically when you have an 
unbalanced transaction and hit tab, or perhaps whenever auto-completion 
adds splits to a transaction that didn't have them before; to me it 
makes much more sense than popping up an error dialog.  If we have to 
have the three-option error dialog, could the default be configurable, 
or could it default to the option used most recently?  Then I could 
just OK out of it with one key when I typed tab mistakenly.

Another idea that would be very helpful would be to have a variation on 
the "auto-split ledger", which does the same thing as A-SL, except 
never automatically opens the splits on a two-ended transaction.  I 
would use AS-L all the time, and this question wouldn't come up, if it 
didn't insist on opening up extra lines on all the transactions where 
there is nothing more to show.

Bng