any of you geeks know WTF I'm doing wrong?

[Walkie]

OK, this is a problem I keep finding, recently with email, instant messaging, FB  and the like.  Here too, IIRC, but my recall for exactly when and where is not great. just it always catches me off-guard and happens so freaking often that I've clean given up trying to communicate with some people; it's too  frustratiing.

As you might have noticed , i have very clumsy fingers and tend to  make a shedload of typos (most of which i manage to correct before posting... or not too long after posting) but this latest thing sucks balls and has me utterly mystified. sometimes my hand slips when tyiping and brushes on something , somewhere on my keyboard that causes an hunge chunk of text (often all of it) to vanish. Ïhave no idea what key I'm accidentally pressing. only that  "undo"buttons consistently fail to undo the mistake. also, it's pointless re-loading latest email draught cos Hotmail autosaves so frequently nowadays that the latest draught is almost certainly the very thing you're looking at.

It's now come to point where, as soon as that happens, i now say "Sod this for a game of toy soldiers" and go watch Tv or something instead.  I mean, FFS, I'm  a slow typer and sometimes it's taken me an hour ot two to get to the point where all the text suddenly vanishes. No fun at all.

Hoping one of you guys have a better idea for fixing it?

Just don't ask me to reproduce the error just  so we can test your better idea. i have not the slightest idea how I'm causing it...except that I think it always occurs when my right hand slips rather than the left. (lack of body awareness doesn't help here either )

[Walkie]

PS oops! I told a lie. on odd occasions it turns out to be easily fixable. On odd occsions, it turns out that I've managed to select and cut or even move a large block of text with a single random movement of my hand.  In which cases, "undo" works. But in the vast majority of cases , i can press "undo"' til the cows come home. to no effect whatsoever.

[Walkie]

PPS. on a related note: I've recently found myself all-too-frequently reformatting entire Word documents in weird and wonderful ways, by similar (possibly same?) random hand motion. and  equally clean given up on attempts to undo. For which reason . i've stopped using the trick of ""type it out in Word, then cut-and-paste"". Don't suggest it.

Dammit, I verge on giving up writing in any shape or form (gave up on handwriting decades ago) .

Ofc , it could be, I should admit,  that I'm having something more than a simple slip of hand,  might be a seizure involving more complex movements. I do get those. nevertheless, I strongly suspect that it's the software that's having some sort of seizure, not me.

[renaeden]

So by Undo, you mean Ctrl Z?

[Pyraxis]

Here is somebody's little app to disable the undo keyboard shortcut, that might help. Though it sounds like you're hitting a different key shortcut too, not sure what that might be.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/dweundo/

[Pyraxis]

There is also ctrl-y, which is redo and might save you sometimes.

[DirtDawg]

I used to have similar trouble with my laptop. You did not describe you computer platform very well, btw.

I found that if I turned down the sensitivity of my touch pad (available in Windows), then hovering over the pad and accidentally selecting a section of my document would not happen. Obviously, if you accidentally select a section of your document, then continue typing, you type over the selection. It can be infuriating. 

The default setting is too sensitive for a clumsy thumb like me. But, I happen to notice that just hovering my hands over the pad even about an inch away would cause it to operate, even though I often did not notice doing that.

If you are using a laptop, try to find this function on your operating system. It might help.

[Jack]

Agree with DirtDawg. Sounds like a touchpad issue. The insert key also controls overwrite mode, in which subsequent text disappears while typing. Not sure if that's happening.

[odeon]

You also might consider using a clipboard manager such as Ditto (https://ditto-cp.sourceforge.io/) so you can browse past copy actions. Now, I'm not on Windows and don't know how Windows clipboard managers compare to what I use in Linux, but it's really useful to have that kind of control over your past copy actions. Linux places a lot of stuff there that isn't from a Ctrl-C. Don't know if Windows does.

[Walkie]

I used to have similar trouble with my laptop. You did not describe you computer platform very well, btw.

oops! still using desktop pc exclusively, cos i definitely can't cope with touchpads, tablets,  smartphones.  damn things seem to go wild before i even touch ém.  hmmmph not sure i can cope with this bloody great keyboard anymore either .

i guess that invalidates your helpful observations. damn. sorry. i  shoulda thought to say before.


anyways , thanks very much  for the suggestions , guys they're not getting me anywhere yet, but good to know someone cares gonna look into odeon's suggestion, next.  yeah. it's freaking windows. had my hard drive partitioned so i could try running linux too, but was too freaking lazy when it came to it.

[odeon]

Not suggesting you to run Linux just yet.

[Charlotte Quin]

Sometimes accidentally pressing the 'insert' key can cause issues, especially if you've clicked the cursor back in a previous sentence/paragraph to fix typos.
You just have to press the key again and you can go back to editing as normal.

[Walkie]

Sometimes accidentally pressing the 'insert' key can cause issues, especially if you've clicked the cursor back in a previous sentence/paragraph to fix typos.
You just have to press the key again and you can go back to editing as normal.

.
Ah! thanks! I  NEVER$ use the insert key. ib do everything by mouse insofar as i can/know . So had to scrutinis the Kb before I detected thos insert key. It's altogether pssible that i mis-press it someimes. especill;y given that it's next to my much-used backspace key

also, unwitting;y bought a KB with American layout last time. Ths confuses heck out of me, cos it means i have to "re-learn positions of keys that i never fully learned in first plsce (my vsual-spatal memory/processing being extremely poor)

howver, am pretty sure (mostly on account of  weird and frustrating  behaviour of quotemark  key) they've made several changes to the kb driver quite recentlyand suspect this (coupled with clumsiness) is the main cause of missing chunks of text. I.e. one of those seldom-used keys on the RHS now behaves sgnificantly differently than before. might bre said insert key, but will be due to some little change in insert jkey function, since it's a relatively new phenonemon

anyway am giving up for  now (on posting) cos internet is horribly, horribly slow ATM. for whatever reason,, making it difficu;t to type responses at all. so leavbing in all those semi-co;ons that i keep typing instead of "L" etc. editing is way too hard a slog.

a[ologies to various other folk that i MEANT to respond to *seeks tir hair out smiley, fails to find. and silently tears hair out yet again  **

[Queen Victoria]

An old story.

Back in the days news agencies (such as Reuters) used teletype machines to transmit information/articles.  (Think a telegraph machine you would type on.)  One machine would inexplicably and sporadically insert a letter into the text.  The repairman struggled to figure out why.  He may even have torn the machine apart.  Then he sat and watched the operator for a day or so.  Problem solved.  When the operator occasionally stood up to reach something on the top of her machine her large breasts would accidentally hit a key.  I don't know what solution they used, but the problem was solved.

Could this be your problem Walkie?

[Walkie]

 
 but nah, if i jumped up and down as often as i mistype...well, i'm not convinced that's even possible, but if i did, im sure that  would be classed as some kind of seizure'

'besides you obviously haven't seen my breasts (or "'"pimples"' as my classmates at school used to, kindly  call them) . They've got slightly bigger in latter years, mind, just big enoufgh to earn me fame at the parcel sorting office where i worked, by dint of me accidentally squashing my left breast (the bigger one) between an extremely  heavy, rounded, rolling   parcel (containing a dumb-bell weight of all things) and the rigid metal side of the carousel.   The injury was swiftly and easily fixed by application of an ice-pack. My reputation , ofc. was never fixed. The story ran through the (incredibly expansive) shopfloor like wildfire.

Lucky that i'm used to being a laughing-stock. i don't even mind. As Melville observed:

“However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more's the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and to be spent in that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.”