[GNC] A feature request for next release

Geert Janssens geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be
Sun Sep 2 14:41:18 EDT 2018


Op zondag 2 september 2018 19:17:47 CEST schreef Rich Shepard:
> On Sun, 2 Sep 2018, Adrien Monteleone wrote:
> > I think labels are already planned to be added for all icons.
> 
> Adrien,
> 
>    That's a good start.

Yep.

> 
> > There have also been discussions around the icon choices themselves and/or
> > redesigning the application around the Gnome Human Interface guidelines
> > which will likely remove some of them entirely or replace them with
> > label-buttons.
> 
>    Regardless of the UI design pattern followed a text-only option should be
> incorporated.
> 
Nope.

Here's my view on it: there are more ideas for the gnucash project than 
manpower to implement them all. So by necessity we prioritize. 

Every extra configuration option that is added increases the maintenance 
burden. Not a bit, but exponentially. Even a simple one as how to display tool 
bar elements adds more code that can have bugs or become buggy over time. So 
again due to time constraints we should be very conservative in adding 
configuration options.

And if we add options, I prefer these to configure the accounting aspects of 
gnucash, not the visual appearance.

So just adding an option to choose the visual style of the tool bar is - 
pardon my pun - not an option. In fact Bob Fewell implemented this while I was 
on holidays and I have refused to add it to the code. The above is my 
motivation.

I'm not against UI tweaks in principle, but I think this level of 
configurability should not be part of the core gnucash application. Many 
tweaks can be done via theming or css customization. I would even be happy if 
someone came up with something like the gnome-tweak-tool specifically to make 
it easier for users to make style changes in gnucash.

As for the specific suggestion of text only tool bar buttons, this used to be 
one of such user tweaks. Unfortunately gtk (the gui toolkit we depend on) 
dropped this option. You could consider this a bug, but that would make it a 
gtk bug. I don't want gnucash to become more complicated just to work around 
it.

Or in other words I believe the gnucash application should follow the chosen 
toolkit's defaults and guidelines and focus on getting a powerful accounting 
engine under the hood.

Having said all that, I also think our UI is desperately in need of some 
serious review and improvement. It's more than 20 years old and a lot has 
changed in terms of computer interaction in that time. That is a project on 
its own though which may or may not be started for gnucash 4.x.

Geert




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