TextEdit Behaving Odd on Big Sur Update

The latest Big Sur update solved it for me.

I'm having a lot of trouble with TextEdit on BigSur 11.6. Often I can't get the cursor to drop to the next line. I've also experienced a couple of crashes. It's hard to believe Apple broke TextEdit. It's gotta be the simplest app they have! Please fix it!

It just happened again. It seems to crash when I use the shift + right arrow to try and select some text. Strangely, Terminal is popping up afterwards and presents the following...

2021-09-18 16:21:32.723 TextEdit[1621:24139] +[NSSavePanel _warmUp] attempted warmup
2021-09-18 16:21:44.456 TextEdit[1621:24139] Spellchecking removed grammar attribute for incorrect range 0 1506 with length 1506
2021-09-18 16:21:44.459 TextEdit[1621:24139] Spellchecking removed grammar attribute for incorrect range 0 1506 with length 1506

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.

Honestly I have had lot's of problems with text editor

It's clear that some nasty bugs remain in TextEdit and have existed in it for years.

It will sometimes not show the top of the document, (You scroll all the way up but it stops well before the top of the document) closing and opening the text document will fix it temporarily.

It will hide also often hide a chunk of text in the document but often this get's resolved by clicking somewhere in the text before the hidden text and pressing the return

It's super annoying when you don't realize it is doing it and make a mistake as a result.

I am using it with just plain text (code) with no special formatting and it works okay most of the time but not a single day goes by without some problems with TextEdit.

I really hope apple fixes it because it's super annoying when you work with a lot of large text files like I do.

But I get it, plain text is such a new and complex thing, maybe one day, with enough funding and advanced CS Research Teams Apple will crack the enigma that is "plain text" (Aka "the plain text problem") and work out how to handle plain text in a consistently reliable way sometime in the next 50 years or so... =-|.

Another NEW bug. Can’t place cursor at the end of a line, can’t select word at end of line. Solution for selecting that word - resize window by by dragging from right edge. This abomination carries over to typing in phone app Documents. Numerous unintended jumps to top.