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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Like others on this issue, the update to Big Sur 11.1 seems to have corrected the erratic behavior of TextEdit.

Thanks, Apple! I depend on TextEdit.
My text editor keeps on crashing again and again...
OS: BigSur | Machine: Macbook Air M1


The 11.1 update didn't help me, but then I'm on an early 2015 Macbook Air. Sad part is the machine was bulletproof prior to this. Looks like I am going to need to backtrack. Ugh. Dreading the time sink, but I need the machine to be fast again, and I use Text Edit a lot!

Update: I switched to Atom. Will see if this meets all of my needs. So far so good.
Agree - I've been having infuriating issues with textedit at macOS 11.2.1, where it hangs with beachball sometimes indefinitely during simple operations like search + replace. This is on a 6 month old macbook pro with maximum available processor, memory and graphics. So what's up with this? It's textedit, for fecks sake.
I have the same issue with TextEdit, very very annoying.
Macbook Air M1 2020, Big sure

btw.
when I had macbook Air 2019 with Catalina, I didn't have any problem...
I have the same issue I can't work in TextEdit 

Macbook Air M1, big sure
My textedit is always crashing even when the file size is relatively small (like 100MG). This has been happening ever since I updated to the Big Garb... I mean big sur
Big Sur has ruined my textedit experience. I try to search for a line of text and it jumps to the line of text and then a swirly hangs. I can not long user text edit because the swirly pops up multiple times. I don't understand why Apple felt the need to jack around with textedit. It's program that had meet its functional perfection. If I could depend on any program, it was textedit. Now it's broken. Please fix!!!!

Please fire the people that felt the need to muck up textedit, they'd probably slash their own tires to prove that they don't know how to put on a spare.

Update to Big Sur 11.1 did not repair the issue.
Can't believe it's not fixed yet.
I'm not a developer but have been trying to find answers to this problem for a couple months now. However, instead of TextEdit scroll jumping the entire application will crash. I'm currently using Big Sur 11.1; though there is an update available that is yet to be installed. Based on other replies it seems like this is still a persistent issue. Absolutely ridiculous.
Still having the same problem, even upgraded the OS 11.2.3. Any idea when Apple is going fix it? very annoying
The problem still persists even after upgraded to 11.2.3. Any idea then will it get fixed, very annoying.
Same experience here. Moving to a non-Apple product for text editing and notes.
MacOS 11.3 here. Same issues with TextEdit. Text jumping around when pasting, inaccessible blocks of blank space in notes, etc.
Yes I have a similar problem on Big Sur, version 11.3.1.

When I cut text from outside textedit & paste into textedit, the text appears fine. Then after typing, a large space appears at the top of textedit and the text is moved to the bottom of the page. It's too annoying to use, so I use other tools for note taking.