A quickfill problem and an enhancement suggestion

Geert Janssens janssens-geert at telenet.be
Wed Apr 6 04:42:21 EDT 2011


On woensdag 6 april 2011, Paul Abrahams wrote:
> On Tuesday, April 05, 2011 06:45:02 PM David T. wrote:
> > > Somehow my reply to the original comment stating that in
> > > the case of
> > > auto fill the backspace key only deletes the extra
> > > characters but not
> > > the last character typed was lost.  Paul, your
> > > suggestion has already
> > > been implemented.
> > 
> > Actually, not quite. My experience is that, yes, a backspace does clear
> > out the remaining Quickfill--but only until you start typing again. If
> > your Quickfill term is "MY GLOBAL BANK TRANSACTION" and you type "My
> > Gl<backspace>", the entry you typed appears. But the moment you start
> > again with the "o", the Quickfill takes over again (and again, and
> > again). This will continue until you have typed out "My Global Bank
> > Transaction.<backspace>". So now, instead of saving you keystrokes, the
> > Quickfill has forced the user to type the full entry out--and then two
> > more keystrokes.
> > 
> > What's the point of having Quickfill like this?

I agree here that in your situation Quickfill is counter-productive.

> 
> Just to clarify: does an initial backspace (or backspacing past the first
> character) now disable Quickfill for the current transaction until the
> transaction has been completed?  That's what I was suggesting.  And if so,
> in what version does that appear?
> 
No this is not implemented yet that I know of.

> To me, the most appealing aspect of this convention is that it utilizes a
> bit of semantics that otherwise would have no meaning.
> 
Yes.

To  all people that have added their ideas and opinions in this thread, can 
you have a look at the uservoice request for this feature [1] and vote for it 
if you care about this feature and haven't done so yet. And if you can add 
useful suggestions of how you think this could best be realized, please add 
them as comments there.

The quickfill discussion has been running for a while now on the user list, 
which is useful to show user concern and their vision on a solution. But my 
experience so far shows also that feature discussions on the list often end up 
being just that: discussions. I hope the uservoice tool may turn out to be a 
more practical tool for turning discussions into a useful prioritized list of 
things to do. But that would only work if we effectively go in and mark our 
most urgent requests.

On the other hand to be fair I want to note that the priorities set via 
uservoice do not necessarily align with the developer's priorities, but it at 
least helps to show more clearly what the users care about and can as such 
influence what developers will be inclined work on next.

Geert

[1] http://gnucash.uservoice.com/forums/101223-feature-
request/suggestions/1568131-provide-per-transaction-cancel-of-autofill-with-
e?ref=title


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