Text field alignments

[Donald Allen]

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 10:42 AM, Maf. King <maf at chilwell.net> wrote:
> On Tuesday 24 February 2009 15:30:09 Donald Allen wrote:
>> On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 10:18 AM, Tommy Trussell
>>
>> <tommy.trussell at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 8:54 AM, Donald Allen <donaldcallen at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> >> On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 9:31 AM, Derek Atkins <warlord at mit.edu> wrote:
>> >> > Charles Day <cedayiv at gmail.com> writes:
>> >> >> On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 10:44 AM, Fred Bone
> <Fred.Bone at dial.pipex.com>wrote:
>> >> >>> When viewing a register in "Basic Ledger" view, the "other-account"
>> >> >>> names in the "Transfer" column are right-justified. So if the
>> >> >>> complete account name is too long to fit, the high-end ("Assets",
>> >> >>> for example) is cut.
>> >> >>>
>> >> >>> However, in a "Split" view, the corresponding text in each split is
>> >> >>> left- justified - except when that part of that split is selected.
>> >> >>> This means that, for example, I see
>> >> >>>  "Assets:Current Assets:Savings Accounts:"
>> >> >>> and have to select the entry to see *which* savings account it is.
>> >> >>>
>> >> >>> Is there any particular reason for this behaviour?
>> >> >>
>> >> >> I don't know, but if no one responds with a particular reason for
>> >> >> leaving it alone, I will go ahead and change it to be
>> >> >> right-justified.
>> >> >
>> >> > I have no idea why it is the way it is; I think changing it is fine.
>> >>
>> >> I'd suggest changing both to left-justified. Without doing anything,
>> >> I'd rather see the high-order bits, the part of the path closest to
>> >> the root of the account tree. I frequently have multiple leaf accounts
>> >> with the same name, e.g., investments in the same mutual fund or stock
>> >> in, say, my IRA and my wife's IRA.
>> >
>> >  Interesting situation, but I think this would NOT be a typical case,
>> > and your situation would be easily addressed by adding a bit of
>> > redundancy to the account name. (You could add the appropriate
>> > initials to them, for example).
>>
>> I (obviously) disagree. For example, you have multiple accounts
>> (individual IRAs plus taxable accounts) at a big mutual fund company
>> like Vanguard and each of them has holdings in, say, "Prime Money
>> Market", a common situation. Cluttering the leaf accounts with
>> initials, as you suggest, strikes me as kludgery to work around
>> something that isn't fundamentally sound (you don't do this with
>> identical filenames in different directories, or identical variable
>> names in different scopes).  I could make some programming-language
>> analogies here, but I'll refrain from doing so for fear of setting off
>> an irrelevant religious war :-)
>>
>> /Don
>>
>
> Yes, but in the case you make, Don, the top-level account (Assets, or
> whatever) is common to all the leaf accounts, and therefore not relevant in
> the case posted by the OP, who is looking for some consistent behaviour in
> the how register displays long tree paths.
>
> As long as this is only about what overflows the text box by default, then my
> vote is for everything to be right-justified in the registers, as this will
> IMHO show more people more useful info more of the time.
>
> /gets ready with flameproofing spray....

Nahh. I actually agree with the way you are thinking about it, even
though you are coming out differently than I am (that's probably a
distant relative of "I have no idea what you just said, but I disagree
with it"). What I'm talking about is that we should be asking
ourselves "what is the most common case and how do we best serve that
case?", which is what you are doing. Using right-justification, only
those people who have no duplicate leaf-account names can be sure they
have the right one without any further graphical gestures. I think our
disagreement boils down to how common that is. If they are in the
majority, then you are right. I don't claim to know what the Gnucash
user population actually does, but I've made my case for why multiple
leaf accounts with the same name makes sense, why I think it could be
common (another example: Expenses:Auto:2005 Toyota Prius:Maintenance
and  Expenses:Auto:1996 Toyota Camry:Maintenance) and why I don't
think cluttering the names with extra stuff to force them to be
different is a clean solution.

/Don


> Maf.
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