Quickfill again

Paul Abrahams abrahams at acm.org
Thu Apr 26 11:59:01 EDT 2012


Every once in a while I'd like to reraise the issue of being able to cancel 
quickfill for a particular transaction.  Right now there are ways to circumvent 
it, like tabbing past the Description field and then backtabbing to it, but 
they are all unnatural and inconvenient.

I suppose that in considering any change to Gnucash, there are two 
considerations: does the change make Gnucash easier to use, and is there a 
disproportionate amount of effort to implement it.  I know there has been lots 
of discussion of this issue before, but most of the suggestions for cancelling 
quickfill, including ones I've made myself,  have entailed an unnatural 
convention.

The change I'm urging is that if a description ends in a space, then no 
quickfill occurs for that transaction.  The test is not performed until the 
user tabs or mouses over to the next field, so no dynamic monitoring of 
keystrokes is needed.  Since ending a description in a space has no other use, 
or at least none that I can think of, this is a natural and unobtrusive 
convention, with the additional property that it is unlikely to be invoked 
accidentally.

I can't speak with certainty to the effort involved in making this change, but 
I wouldn't expect it to require an excessive amount of coding.

Thanks for reconsidering this idea.



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