I’ve had a mysterious problem with disappearing text for as long as I’ve had computers. It can happen in emails, text documents, even right here on the SDMB while composing a post.
It always happens as I am making an edit to a sentence or word. Suddenly every character I type replaces the one after it. So if I am trying to insert a whole sentence, by the time I am done typing it, it has completely erased the following sentence. The only way I can escape is to copy the text to the clipboard and exit the document, (or back up the browser), open back up a new document and paste it back in. In the case of emails, I only have to save it to my drafts folder and then re-open it.
At first I thought it was my keyboard so I bought a new one. Then I decided that it must be something with my PC, but I’m on my third and still this bug still rears it’s ugly head every so often. As far as I can tell it is completely random. Someone suggested that it might be caused by the num lock key but I am not convinced.
What in the world am I missing here. I have described this problem to countless people over the last several years and no one seems to know what I am talking about. Surely some of you have been down this road.
Sounds to me like you are describing the function of the ‘Insert’ key.
It’s quite easy to hit it by accident when using backspace. Just hit it again to turn it off. In most good editors the cursor will change when the insert mode is active.
Hmmm…just did a simple test in notepad and I can’t reproduce the problem by using the insert key. As fas as I could tell, the insert key had no effect at all on my cursor or the text.
I’ll definitely keep this in mind next time it happens though, it seems to happen at least once a week.
Also (at least in most Microsoft software) if you look at the status bar at the bottom of the program sometimes you will see either “OVR” or “INS” or maybe something else (varies from program to program - in Word 2003 it’s OVR). In Word 2003, if OVR is greyed out when you put the cursor in a section of already-typed text and start typing, the new letters will be added and the rest of the text pushed to the right to make room as you would normally expect. If OVR is lit up, the behavior you describe above occurs.
Yeah, you’re hitting the insert key by accident, maybe when you’re aiming for the backspace key. I do that from time to time. The solution, of course, is just to hit the insert key again. I’ll bet dollars to donuts that’s what’s going on.