After deleting, other text is written over

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Level 1

9 points

After deleting, other text is written over

Hello,

I have been having this problem with Mac OS X for a long time and on multiple machines. It occurs in multiple apps and browsers, which made me think that there was some setting I had wrong, but I have been able to find nothing of use searching the internet.

When I highlight some text and delete it, the selected area stays selected, basically selecting the next set of characters. So when I continue typing, I type over that bit of select text.

For example, say I have the following selected between the brackets: The quick [brown fox] jumps over the lazy dog.

Now after I delete the text, the following text between the brackets will be selected: The quick [ jumps ov]er the lazy dog.

The expected result would be to have no text selected and the cursor simply at the the 'J' (or space before) in the word jumps.

It's incredibly annoying because I end writing over text that I still want.

Any help would be much appreciated. I'm currently running Catalina 10.15.4 on a 2015 MBP.

MacBook Pro 15", macOS 10.15

Posted on Apr 27, 2020 11:13 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

BDAqua

Level 10

245,429 points

Apr 27, 2020 1:23 PM in response to danderson_j

That is pretty wild & a brand new one on me after reading 100s of 1,000s of posts!

Safe Boot from the HD, (holding Shift key down at startup), does the problem occur in Safe Mode?

Safe mode attempts to repair Disks & clears lots of caches, so if Safe Mode works try again in regular boot.

If problem persists...

You can save us asking dozens of questions by submitting a report...

EtreCheck is a simple little app to display the important details of your system configuration and allow you to copy that information to the Clipboard. It is meant to be used with Apple Support Communities to help people help you with your Mac.

http://www.etresoft.com/etrecheck

Pastebin is a good place to paste the whole report if you capture the URL while there…

https://pastebin.com/

Workable but harder for me to work with...the Note tool on the bottom of this editor's toolbar, as shown in the image, to copy and paste the output from EtreCheck.

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Answer 2

danderson_j Author

Level 1

9 points

Apr 27, 2020 1:37 PM in response to BDAqua

Okay, I'll run it when I get home a little later today! A couple of other thoughts with this problem:

This isn't the first machine I've experienced it on - I had a 2018 Air for work last year that gave me the same issue.

I found one other post on the web talking about this issue - it's a coder describing the same problem for a much older version of Mac OS but it's app specific. I actually used his example in my original post. Doesn't look like he found an answer. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21408446/mac-automatically-selecting-text-after-delete

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Answer 3

danderson_j Author

Level 1

9 points

Apr 29, 2020 9:48 AM in response to BDAqua

The only Finder enhancement would be Alfred 4.

Ran in safe mode yesterday and haven't noticed this problem since then. I'll give it a few more days, just because I doubt that booting safe mode once would clear everything up, considering this is something I've noticed on other machines.

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