TextEdit Behaving Odd on Big Sur Update

Hi,

I'm an avid user of TextEdit to keep track of my thoughts and To-Do's through my work day. The result is, I end up with a fairly long text file, but not big on size in terms of storage.

After updating to Big Sur 11.0.1, I'm noticing an odd behaviour.

When every I press [Delete] more than thrice, the scroll bar jumps to the top of the text, i.e. the first line in the text file. This is very frustrating, especially, when you have lot of text and it scrolls all the way to the top.

The only solution I have found is to press [Delete] slowly (may be one character per second) to avoid the scroll bar jumping to the first line of the text file.

Also noticed, it does not happen in a full sentence, but only when when there's a short word and a line break [Enter] above and below the word.

I'm continuing with the same file I had saved on Catalina and never had this issue.

Looks like a bug to me.

[PS: I am a user experience designer, not a developer and only have minimal knowledge of coding. ]

Thanks,
Anish
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  • The cursor position is sometimes reset elsewhere in the file after a paste. Typically, and hopefully by spec, the cursor or insertion point would be positioned at the end of the paste. When the jump happens, 70--80% of the time the cursor jumps to the very start, or to very end of the file. Hypothesizing here---some memory is not being re/initialized, and random data is used for the cursor position. When the value is out of bounds, it is interpreted as fail-safe low: go to position zero, or fail-safe high: go to EOF. Sometimes the value is just some random place within the file! Woe to s/he who was already typing post-paste, thinking s/he knew where s/he was in the file!

    Next, a paste will often create an inviolable amount of white space above the paste. The cursor cannot be positioned into this space, click as you might. When an insertion is made prior to the beginning of the new paste, the Inviolate White Space disappears (and the lower part of the file scrolls up).  The vertical height of the IWS seems to be about 7 lines for me, and is independent of the length of the pasted selection. Before you type to remove the IWS, scroll the page: sometimes the window acts as if an opaque empty frame overlays there and lines of text disappear behind it! (And try to scroll up, i.e. backwards, in a long file after such a paste: the window fights you every inch of way! It does not obey my mouse! It does not obey the arrow keys!) OSX 11.6, TextEdit Version 1.16 (365.2).

    This bug can be triggered pasting from one plain text file to another. It may be more frequent when the paste starts or/and ends at the left and right margins respectively. That is, triple-click to grab a whole paragraph as the selection, then copy.

  • I get the same on Monterey 12.4. Copy/paste from a terminal also causes issues reliably, with a large chunk of whitespace above what you paste in, which seems like maybe a vertical tab or something. deleting this sometimes jumps you to the bottom of the file. Also there are often problems with lines of text actually being displayed over the top of other lines of text.

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Sample text file to reproduce the bug. Paste the text below in TextEdit on Big Sur. Scroll down a bit, preferably below the first page fold and try deleting a sentence by first selecting it and then hitting [Delete]; the scroll bar will go to the top of the text file.

Buy Milk
Walk The Dog
Refuel The Car

Buy Groceries
Order iPhone 12
Update MacBook Pro to Big Sur

Check MacBook Air Battery
Pay Mobile Bill
Pay Netflix

Upgrade Apple Music Plan
Add Jonathan to Apple Music Family Plan
Call Martha

Buy Milk
Walk The Dog
Refuel The Car

Buy Groceries
Order iPhone 12
Update MacBook Pro to Big Sur

Check MacBook Air Battery
Pay Mobile Bill
Pay Netflix

Upgrade Apple Music Plan
Add Jonathan to Apple Music Family Plan
Call Martha

Buy Milk
Walk The Dog
Refuel The Car

Buy Groceries
Order iPhone 12
Update MacBook Pro to Big Sur

Check MacBook Air Battery
Pay Mobile Bill
Pay Netflix

Upgrade Apple Music Plan
Add Jonathan to Apple Music Family Plan
Call Martha

Buy Milk
Walk The Dog
Refuel The Car

Buy Groceries
Order iPhone 12
Update MacBook Pro to Big Sur

Check MacBook Air Battery
Pay Mobile Bill
Pay Netflix

Upgrade Apple Music Plan
Add Jonathan to Apple Music Family Plan
Call Martha

Buy Milk
Walk The Dog
Refuel The Car

Buy Groceries
Order iPhone 12
Update MacBook Pro to Big Sur

Check MacBook Air Battery
Pay Mobile Bill
Pay Netflix

Upgrade Apple Music Plan
Add Jonathan to Apple Music Family Plan
Call Martha


Thanks,
Anish







  • Same issue here + constant crashing of this simple app. It has worked flawless for 10+ years and now this after BigSur update. No update that fixes this??? We are talking about a simple text app.

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I'm having similar problems. Pasting text can cause scrolling to jump, the last line of the document is extends below the window by default, as well as some other odd line handling behavior.

Introduced after upgrading to Big Sur.
  • Like others here, I have experienced this same behavior. For past 20 years, I have used TextEdit for all my notes, and specifically set it to plain text mode so that I don't have to deal with formatting, weird special characters or line break issues. Yet somehow they took the easiest, simple app and added problems in the latest OS X installments. I did take note that in one of the updates, a few of the blatant annoyances - the random cursor jump - went away, but then other extremely unnecessary bugs came into play. Right now, when I paste my simple easy plain text, a huge 10 line gap with strange behaviors is added to the paste, which means I have to go in and hit delete on all the garbage characters it added. I swear, how do you go backwards like this and take what was already working great and ruin it? There are a ton of other glitches, bugs, inconsistencies [etc] which can be saved for other threads - but why would they mess with textedit like this??

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I have the same issue since upgrading to Big Sur. Very annoying.
  • 1 Confirmed same (very annoying) behavior caused by Big Sur upgrade.

I'm hitting a variation of this. Even a single delete in the top line can make the cursor jump to the end of the file, but it's erratic, I haven't found a pattern.
Same here. I use TextEdit for Lego set inventory, and those files get to be pretty long too. The only things I've seen that keeps the file from jumping around is to select the text I want to delete and hit RETURN instead of delete. Best workaround I've found so far. The application also highlights the text lines differently than it did prior to the update.
I'm also experiencing this problem and I'm also an avid user of TextEdit. Pasting text also causes scroll to top. Very annoying. Upgraded to Big Sur on a 2016 MacBook Pro.
I run into the same problem too! Upgraded to Big Sur on a MacBook Pro 2016 15".
I confirm this bug upon upgrading from Catalina to Big Sur. It's crazy annoying. Hitting Return instead of Delete seems to me the best solution. The "slow Delete" also works, but risks a repetitive Delete that erases more than you intended. One hopes that Apple will quickly fix this regression.
Yes the bug exists. It's driving me insane. Please fix it.
I had the very same problem after the upgrade to Bug Sur... (sorry for the laspus ;-)
I use TextEdit for my daily log of work completed. The file does get long, as I rotate once a year.
Pasting text in scrolls me to the top of the screen. My cursor is still in place so pressing down arrow will scroll me back - but - This is extremely disconcerting.

Selecting text does not show the exact selection, it is one character off to the left.

Typing becomes extremely labored - as if there are many calculations taking place in-between each character.

I didn't have any of these issues before installing Big Sur.

This issue happens not only when deleting a sentence, but also while removing an empty line in the middle or bottom of the page. Same bug also goes to plaintext editing :(
Apple, please fix this bug!!!
Oh my gosh ... I thought I was the only one. So glad to see that's not the case. I mean, I wish it wasn't a bug, but glad it isn't just my computer since I just bought it brand new ~2 months ago. I sure hope Apple comes up with a fix for this ASAP; I use TextEdit for A LOT of things ... and need it to be working like it should, not with all of these bug issues which are highly annoying, disconcerting, aggravating and waste time. Thank you.
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