Entering Data in the Register

[Colin Scott]

I have had something of a torrid time this week, entering transactions
out of date sequence.  (It's just about the year end, so I've been
forward dating transactions relating to the new year that I don't want to
appear in the old year's figures).

My problems are, I freely admit, essentially user errors.  I initially
had the preferences set so that "Enter" did _not_ take me to the blank
transaction.  So what happens is that as soon as the transaction is
completed, it immediately (and quite correctly!)  Now, if the transaction
is not the last in the sequence then the cursor is now *NOT* on the blank
transaction as one might normally expect, but on the next transaction in
the register.  So if, as I tend to do, I immediately start entering the
next transaction without looking, I find myself overtyping what is
already there - NOT good!  (And if I don't look closely enough, I _don't_
find myself overtyping - I just completely replace the old with the new,
and the system silently permits it.

So my next step was the make the "Enter" key take me to a blank
transaction.  But in this mode, if I hit "Enter"  too soon I suddenly
find myself at the bottom of the register, on the blank transaction, and
if I'm lucky the transaction I was working on remains somewhere further
up the list.  If I'm *not* lucky, so I haven't completed all the account
entries, then it is possible that the transaction actually disappears
completely from *this* register, and I then have to go looking for it in
some other account's register in order to finish it off.  Again, this is
all correct behaviour in response to my own entry error, but it is
horrible nonetheless.

All of this rather reinforces three views I formed when I started using
Gnucash:  

1:  that saved transactions should be incapable of being amended without
explicit confirmation (or at least that the system should be configurable
to include this feature).

2:  that once one has entered any data into a transaction, or in any way
modified it, one should not be able enter or amend any other transaction
on that register without *explicitly* ending the current one, either by
clicking on a button or pressing some (possibly user-definable) key
*other than* Enter ...

3:  that it should be possible to cancel *all* changes made to a
transaction whilst editing it, and not just the last split changed.

On a closely related topic, there is currently a mechanism to prevent
accidental amendment of a reconciled transaction, but I have to say that
I find the panel that implements this a tad clumsy.  Ideally, instead of
being able to cursor to any field in the transaction, start typing, and
*then* get the message, IMHO it would be much friendlier and slicker if
simply typing on a field did nothing, but a right-click on any field in
the transaction offered a drop-down offering the option to amend the
transaction, thus making all fields amendable.  Ideally, the drop-down
should show two separate options - "amend saved transaction" (which would
deal with my point 1 above) and "amend  reconciled transaction" - and the
correct one would have to be selected to permit amendment to proceed.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this, and would it be reasonably easy to
implement this style of working?  I know the right-click approach is very
much in the Windows style, although there is already a right-click
dropdown - would it jar in the Linux world?

Colin