Trouble With "Enter" vs. "Tab" (Again)

John Ralls jralls at ceridwen.us
Mon Nov 14 16:35:16 EST 2011


On Nov 14, 2011, at 10:24 AM, David T. wrote:

> John--
> 
> I am sorry I missed the details about the Tab key moving to the next field, while the Enter key move to the next line. Frankly, to me that's not the point.
> 
> 
> Ultimately, the point is that the Enter key "finishes the transaction edit" but still keeps the transaction open onscreen. This misleads users, and will cause them to have the kinds of troubles I experienced. I *still* don't understand the reason WHY the Enter key finishes the transaction edit. If there is a functional use-case reason for finishing the transaction edit every time a user presses Enter, I'd really like to hear it. I trying to understand this.

Simple: You entered a transaction, but made a mistake. Perhaps you meant to change the date, perhaps you accepted 
the auto-filled account or amount. Doesn't matter, you need to change something. Let's pick the date, because that's the 
worst-case for what you're asking for. You click on the date with the mouse, fix it, and hit enter.

As written, gnucash makes your change and moves the focus to the next account. If Enter behaved like Tab, you'd have to
advance across the whole transaction (5 enters) or go back to the mouse to click in  another transaction to get it to close. 
In Split view, you'd have to go through every field of every remaining split, or arrow down, or click in another transaction.

> 
> In the absence of such an explanation, would it be such a horrible solution to remove the closing action of the Enter key behavior altogether, and instead have the closing action attached to the empty split situation (as it currently is when the user presses Tab on an empty line)? As an end user, I would be willing to go to Bugzilla and file an RFE bug request for this change, if it seems like it makes sense.

No, it doesn't, as illustrated above.
> 
> Adding a per-transaction nag dialog will NOT help the situation, and I really don't think it would be helpful to add *another* key combination (CTRL-Enter) into the mix. I would rather see the distinction go away altogether.
It wouldn't be per-transaction: It would only stop you "committing" an unbalanced transaction. 
> 
> As for the problem with entering capital gains, you refer to the current functionality as a "hack." That suggests to me that someone purposefully made use of the difference between Tab and Enter to convince Gnucash to behave in a specific way in this instance. Since it *is* a hack, and since you've made it clear that there are unlikely to be fixes to this, I think it should be clearly stated in the documentation that this is an issue. I have filed bug 664054 to address the documentation question.

No, someone purposely made it possible for stock accounts to record splits without affecting the number of shares, but
made the autobalance code put a single share in if the split is open for editing when the transaction is "committed".
Better documentation would certainly be welcome. I hope you'll provide a patch to go with your bug report.

Regards,
John Ralls




More information about the gnucash-user mailing list