Ok.
Incase you were wondering, it’s this:
Go to correct a mistake and suddenly the letter before it’s erased. For ex.
SmilyDeath=SmileDeath.
Just like that.
So, why?
This is in Word proccessing programs.
To replace a word with a different word easily, or rewrite a sentence quickly. You realize that you can toggle it on/off by hitting the insert key on your keyboard, right? (At least, I think that’s universal.)
I don’t like it. When I accidently toggle that switch (it seems pretty universal to me) it really pisses me off.
Well, I’ve done technical support for a word processing program (it rhymes with “Turd”) and I’d say it’s a godsend because without fail, once a day I’d get a call with a very frustrated/irate/pissy customer saying: “All of a sudden, everything I type types over whatever’s there!” (Or some permutation of that… you get the idea.)
Amazing how happy they’d be when you’d show them that one keystroke fixes the problem.
Other than that, I’d say overtype is pretty useless though, from a user’s perspective.
Not so useless. Just as the capslock key can save you from pressing shift for every letter in the REALLY ANNOYING USENET POST, so the insert key can let you rewrite a few words or a sentence without first having to hit the backspace or delete keys to remove the old stuff. You toggle overtype on, type until you reach the end of the bit you want to change, then toggle it off and continue in insert mode.
I use the equivalent vi mode, ‘R’, sometimes when I want to overtype a few letters. With vi, though, it’s easier to change a specific unit of text (word, sentence, paragraph), so I don’t often use it for longer strings of text.
Strangely enough, when I typed the words in all caps above, I did so by holding down the shift key rather than toggling capslock. I often forget to use capslock, but I do occasionally use overtype.
Just a thought: perhaps the insert key is a holdover from pre-mouse days, from before you could highlight and delete a block of text before re-typing it?
I find it absolutely vital when I’m editing a big data file, where I need to change a few digits here and there. When you’re editing words, usually the word you’re replacing is a different length, so overwrite mode isn’t much help. However, when you know you’re going to be replacing characters one by one, overwrite mode saves a lot of key strokes.
Why it acually warrants its own key on the keyboard, though, is beyond me. Must be a hold over from the bad old days when humans had to do a lot of editing of data files.
Cessandra has hit the nail on the head. In pre-mouse days, it was very useful, for the very reason she points out. And Podkayne is also correct; there are times, outside of WP applications, when it’s right handy.
Now, youngsters, let’s talk about the Scroll Lock key…
It’s still useful if you’re hand editing fixed-length data files. Not everything is XML yet.
A DOS throwback useful for pissing me off.
I have my Insert button set to give me a lower-case sigma in M$ Word. It’s easier to notice than an accidental overwrite, and I was using sigmas a lot this past semester in lab reports for a particular class, so it was easy to type it in one key stroke. I had it as lower-case alpha at one point last year.