[GNC] column width help

[Adrien Monteleone]

I think the issue is one of expectation of habit from familiarity.

The registers are laid out in grids. Not all grids are 'spreadsheets'.

But because people are familiar with them and have developed a habit of 
working a certain way with the most predominant of them, they are 
confused when a different piece of software doesn't work the same way. 
Even among spreadsheets this is an issue — LibreOffice doesn't work the 
same way everywhere like Excel does, neither Lotus 1-2-3, or Quattro, or 
even Excel for DOS vs. Excel for Windows. All software has learning 
curves, and each take their own approach to similar functionality.

Alternatively, the devs could re-write GnuCash to make the register look 
like something else entirely, such as what QuickBooks does. You don't 
even really get to a use a 'register' regularly there, but have to enter 
everything in special windows depending on the transaction type. The 
'register' is more for simply viewing.

I don't know that many GnuCash users would be a fan of that approach, 
but it would also solve the 'expectation of habit from familiarity' with 
respect to sizing columns.

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I find the Balance column autofit to be quite intuitive and helpful. You 
don't have to muck with dragging lines, the double-click will make sure 
all digits are visible. Modern spreadsheets also have this function, 
though it may not always be via double-clicking the header.

I also think the choice of Description being the 'odd-ball' is the best 
one of the column choices available. It is the only one I wouldn't 
terribly mind if it was truncated a bit due to window width if I didn't 
want to scroll. Of all the other columns, I always want to see 100% of 
their data.

Providing at least one column to auto-fill out the width and also not 
trigger a scroll bar, without me having to tediously re-size columns 
precisely, is a neat feature.

Excel doesn't have it. Maybe I should file a bug with MS? Oh wait...



Regards,
Adrien

On 11/15/25 11:01 PM, R Losey wrote:
> I often use double-clicking in Excel to auto-adjust width, and that's
> exactly what GnuCash does -- except that GnuCash allows one to double-click
> the header for the final column, and the special handling of the
> "Description" column.  Whether or not the Description field should be they
> way it is could be discussed.
> 
> But aside from that quirk, I find it very Excel-like.