Hello, I've been using GnuCash since 2004 and love it. I've talked it up to several different people and they're now happy GnuCash users. It's a great tool that fills a huge gap in the OSS community.
All that being said, I'm absolutely pulling my hair out over the behavior of "tab" (keystroke), "return" (keystroke), Delete (button on the toolbar), and Cancel (button on the toolbar) when journaling split transactions. I'll do my best to describe my frustrations, and hopefully this will start a discussion that will result in a ticket being that improves the end user experience when journaling split transactions. Here are some scenarios that cause me great heartburn. Maybe there are workarounds that I'm unaware of? Issue #1: The tab key behavior. Steps to reproduce: 1.) Press Split 2.) Create a description for the entire split transaction. Call it "My Credit Card". 3.) Press tab once, and you get to the Action column. 4.) Press tab again, and you're at the Memo. Tab again to get to the account. Tab another 2 times and you're at "Charge." Enter 500. 5.) Hit tab. You are brought to a new line in the split transaction. That's great! That's what I expect! 6.) Enter a description. Hit tab to get to the Account, and choose an account. Hit tab and enter 25 for the payment. 7.) Hit tab and you're at the Charge column. Hit tab again. THIS IS WHERE THE PROBLEM IS. Rather than taking you down to a new subtransaction in the existing split transaction it takes you back up to the date column for the entire transaction. This behavior is inconsistent with the behavior seen in step #5. If you press tab on step #5 and you are brought to a new subtransaction line why doesn't that ALWAYS happen? I tried using "return" at the end of #7 to get to a new subtransaction. That gives me a new subtransaction but the account is set to Imbalance-USD. When I enter a memo that I've already entered before (e.g. Exxon) GnuCash doesn't auto-populate the Account based upon what Account was used the last time I entered that memo (Expenses:Auto:Gas). As a result, the "return" behavior, while it solves the problem of creating subtransactions, creates a NEW problem of not auto-populating the Account. Note: I've also tried going down to the bottom of the split transaction and hitting "Enter". You get a blank subtransaction line, and the auto-populate of the Account works. But hitting "Enter" at the end of that subtransaction brings you to the line that contains the split transaction itself. The bottom line is that there doesn't appear to be a keyboard only way of journalling a split transaction, and that's a huge pain in the neck when I'm journalling my credit card statement (it has over 200 transactions sometimes). Going from keyboard to mouse and then back to keyboard significantly slows me down. GnuCash 1.x didn't have this behavior. Please help restore the GnuCash 1.x behavior of tabs in split transactions. Issue #2: Cancel button in a split transaction doesn't work. This is a usability and interface improvement issue. "Delete", "Cancel", and "Blank" are very similar to non-programmers. I understand the subtleties, as I'm a programmer. But my Dad wouldn't know what "Delete" means vs "Cancel" vs "Blank." There are lots of times that I'm in a split transaction and I want to remove one of the transactions involved in the Split. Since the "Cancel" button has a big red X it catches my eye faster than a garbage can. As a result I tend to click the Cancel button when I mean to click the Delete button. Can you maybe disable the Cancel button when you're in a split? Issue #3: Blank doesn't "blank" a transaction. It takes you to the bottom of the ledger. I understand that this is intuitive to you all, but it's not at all intuitive to an end-user. If I'm in the middle of a 200 transaction split and I hit Blank I'm expecting that it will blank out the current transaction I'm on. I don't expect it to take me to the end of the account ledger. Note that I'm using GnuCash 2.1.1 (from r16107:16109M) built from source under OSX. I love GnuCash, but every time my credit card statement comes in I hate journalling it because of the time it takes. And no, I don't care to set up QIF imports of my statements. The last time I did that it didn't work very well at all... Thanks for your time, and I look forward to your responses to my above issues. -c _______________________________________________ gnucash-devel mailing list gnucash-devel@gnucash.org https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
