Bug?

[David T.]

Jacqueline,

Welcome to GnuCash! I am glad you were able to solve your problem. 

As a bit of background, please be aware that GnuCash originated in the Linux world, and has been ported over to the Mac world. Things in the different worlds function differently, and on occasion, things that Mac users expect to happen don’t happen quite the way they think it should. The developer most responsible for bringing GnuCash to Macs (John Ralls) has done astounding work to make this software run as smoothly and as Mac-like as it does. There are still rough edges where the match-ups aren’t as clean, and I expect that they will remain.

You have come up against some of these quirks, and even perhaps a bug with the New Folder button, and it’s too bad that has caused you confusion. The recommendations of others to place your data file in a new folder is sound; I will note that there is a longstanding request to allow GnuCash’s backup files and logs to be placed in a separate folder. Unfortunately, as GnuCash is volunteer-created and maintained, none of the volunteer developers has taken this request up.

Before you get too much further down the process, I would like to draw your attention to one Mac quirk that seems to trip every new user up: if you double-click a GnuCash file in Finder, GnuCash will NOT open that file; GnuCash will insist on opening the file it last opened. This is a known problem that is most easily addressed by using the File->Open menu option in GnuCash to ensure that the file you open is the correct one.

By all means, mess away, and come back with your questions!

Best,
David

> On May 25, 2016, at 1:23 PM, Jacqueline Greenleaf <jacque at book-woman.net> wrote:
> 
> Dustin, you’re right, I sure didn’t read the entire manual before I started doing stuff!
> 
> I’m sure everything I need to know and more is in that manual, but in general I find I have to mess with things a bit before the manual starts making sense. And even when I started trying to find the answer I needed in the manual, I couldn’t - nothing I searched on returned a result, undoubtedly because I was searching on the wrong terms.
> 
> Anyway, thanks for all the help, it’s finally working the way I expect a program to work.
> 
> 
>> On May 25, 2016, at 9:57 AM, Dustin Henning <The00Dustin at gmx.com> wrote:
>> 
>> The "Create Folder" button may be a bug, but the behavior you initially described is definitely normal for GnuCash.  I'm not sure where this "moving everything" problem is rooted, though.  I thought you indicated that you have been deleting these extraneous files as you go.  In that case, "everything" is just the one .gnucash file.  Once you move it and open it from the new location, all other files should be created in that new location and the problem should not recur.  Even if you hadn't been deleting all of the files as you go, moving them all doesn't have to be done individually.  They can be multi-selected and moved together.  One method of multi-select that I believe works on Mac PCs the same as other PC platforms is referred to as lassoing, you click blank space on the desktop and drag to create a square "lasso" that highlights everything it surrounds.  Other standard PC methods are Shift+Click which will highlight everything "between" a currently selected item and the clicked item and Ctrl+Click which will individually select each additional item clicked while Ctrl is held.  Mac PCs have a similar function, but it may not use the same keys (for instance, you may have to test with Command or Alt).  Regardless, it's arguably a one-time exercise that is only necessary because you didn't know how to use the software.  One might argue documentation should be improved here, for instance, when I first started using GnuCash I wasn't aware of this and had to move "everything" it created from one documents folder to a segregated subfolder, but I couldn't swear that I read a lot of documentation before having that experience to begin with.
>> 
>> On 5/25/2016 12:26 PM, Jacqueline Greenleaf wrote:
>>> But that’s the thing - I can’t see how to do this.
>>> 
>>> I haven’t been able to get the “Create Folder” button in gnucash to work. And yes, I can create a new folder from the desktop, but then I still have to gather up the gnucash files manually and put them there.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
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