Usability suggestion

[Derek Atkins]

Boris Goldowsky <boris at alum.mit.edu> writes:

> 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.

You can do this via the key-sequence: Alt-A p

Alt-A opens the "Actions" menu
p selects "Split Transaction"

See all those underlined letters -- those are the hotkeys.

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

Yes, see above.  All the hotkeys are "documented" in the interface.
I don't know if they are listed in the gnucash-docs help pages.

> 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.

Sounds like a reasonable suggestion -- can you file an RFE at
http://bugzilla.gnome.org and make this suggestion?

> 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.

Another decent idea.  Can you file another RFE on this one?

Thanks!

> Bng

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
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