On Aug 16, 2018, at 6:49 PM, Ken Heard <kensli...@teksavvy.com> wrote:
Adrien,
Thank you for your reply. It arrived in my inbox just before I left
Canada for France. I returned to Canada yesterday and saw it for the
first time today.>
On 2018-07-26 02:11, Adrien Monteleone wrote:
Ken,
Sorry, I saw this when you originally posted it (twice) but wasn’t able
to reply at the time and I see you haven’t heard from anyone yet.
Although seemingly unhelpful, the error message is telling you how to
fix the problem. Apparently, after changing the separator to a backslash
“\” (which is also a file path separator in Windows, not a safe choice!)
you named about 50 accounts to include the old path separator “:” as
part of the actual name. If you re-institute the “:” as path separator,
GnuCash is going to freak out because it will appear you have a bunch of
new accounts that don’t exist yet. (and likely attempt at some point to
get you to create them as you tab/enter through transactions, if not
just totally blow up or freeze as it seems to have done.) The solution
is to FIRST, change all of your accounts names to NOT use “:” in the
name itself, perhaps substituting hyphen “-“ or something reasonably
similar. (Commas are unsafe choices also due to CSV import/export issues
with various software - you don’t want to deal with comma delimited
files if fields contain commas themselves unless specially handled)>
Yes, today I did remove all the colons in the names and codes of my
account which had them. Now when I open GnuCash the list of account
names and codes does not appear. I still however have another problem,
see below.>
Once you’ve eliminated all instances of “:” in your account names, then
the error/warning won’t appear and you can change the account separator
back to it. As long as you stick to a single OS, you can choose to use
either \, or / accordingly for separators, but commas are usually bad
news. (Windows uses backslashes for file paths and *nix uses
backslashes) Pipes and periods even can be an issue, though more rarely
so. (Pipes redirect output and periods are usually extension separators,
but this only an issue in Windows)>
I only use Linux, currently the Stretch iteration of Debian; so I would
use only the backslash. For the reason which you state using a slash --
or pipes or periods -- is not wise. I think that if I were to abandon
the colon -- which I may not do in any event -- I would use the tilde,
single or double. I would never use those symbols in an account name or
code.>
That really limits things a bit. But you can likely safely use hyphen
“-“, underscore”_”, semi-colon “;”, tilde “~”, middle dot “•”, small
middle dot “·”, double left arrow “«”, double right arrow “»”,
equivalent “≈”, diamond “◊”, en-dash “–“, and em-dash “—“. (those last
two are sometimes indistinguishable from each other or even from hyphen
in some fonts) On that note, while you’re replacing your copious use of
“:” as part of account names, consider hyphens “-“ and underscores “_”
as replacements. Some coding conventions use underscores to separate
words—e.g., “camel_case” instead of "camelCase", and hyphens to
indicated sub-levels or more specific information—e.g.,
“Rent-Apartment_A” and "Rent-Apartment_B". I too experimented with other
separators, but found the colon to be a well thought out default as it
is easy to quickly step through the account hierarchy one letter and
colon at a time. Other choices are farther away and harder to tap
easily. (some of the above suggestions require 3rd & 4th level modifier
keys) Also, muscle memory is a consideration. Regards,
Adrien
Now the other problem I referred to above, and which I also mentioned in
my original post, is that I cannot change GnuCash preferences. I think I
am not mistaken in assuming that the file containing the preferences
chosen is in directory ~/gconf/apps/gnucash/dialogues/preferences. The
only file in that directory is %gconf.xml, only 333 B but is dated in
2014. All the permissions seem to be correct, drwxr-x--- for me, my
group and for others. I would appreciate help on restoring ability to
set my own preferences.
Regards,
Ken
