Cursor moves back, randomly

Support
1

Operating system

macOS

Joplin version

3.5.5

Desktop version info

Joplin 3.5.5 (prod, darwin)

Device: darwin, Apple M1 Pro
Client ID: 7ef24444fa6446bb888ec04517a69282
Sync Version: 3
Profile Version: 49
Keychain Supported: Yes
Alternative instance ID: -

Revision: 00f9e93

Backup: 1.4.3
Freehand Drawing: 3.1.0

What issue do you have?

While typing, the cursor moves to the LEFT a handful of spaces. I typed "7/8," and was about to type something else when the cursor randomly jumped to the left of "7/8". This happened a number of times since the latest update. The problem seems worse when I open a note in a new window.

2

That’s definately a Joplin bug, as you don’t have any user installed plugins. Any chance you could create an issue for this on Github?

3

why create an issue on github? Isn’t this the forum for Joplin issues?

4

Yes the forum is a place to report issues, but there is a difference between an issue and a bug, because an issue is not neccesarily something wrong with the code (but bugs are a type of issue).

The forum is very high traffic and has no categorisation of which topics require action. While a member of the Joplin team may look at this and create an issue on Github for you, that doesn’t always happen. For the best chances of this being worked on, I am suggesting you can raise the issue on Github yourself. It also means you will be subscribed to any progress updates for the issue, but you can opt out of such notifications if you wish

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5

Also, I have a couple of questions:

  1. Are you using the markdown editor or the rich text editor?
  2. Does this only happen with certain notes, or with any note?
6

When in doubt, this page Sign in to GitHub ¡ GitHub summarizes very well the different situations (bug report, feature request, support) and links you to the correct place depending on it. Worth a bookmark imo.

7

Markdown editor

It seems to happen to every note I have edited since the update, but that is hard to tell.

8

@pasternakEXTR3M I did some testing with Joplin 3.5.5 and have not be able to reproduce the issue you are experiencing, on Joplin for Windows. I have some additional questions:

  1. Roughly how many times has this happened and at what frequency? Eg. once in an hour / once in a day / once in a week?
  2. Do you have Joplin open on multiple devices at the same time, or just one at a time?
  3. Did you update to v3.5.4 before 3.5.5, and if so, did you experience any issues with 3.5.4?
  4. Do you have the 'Markdown editor: Render markup in editor' setting enabled, or you just edit using raw markdown all the time?
  5. Do you happen to notice if the sync is running while the issue occurs?

This may be related to historic cursor issues, which seem to be primarily on the Mac build of Joplin desktop: Cursor jumps to top of editor when typing ¡ Issue #8960 ¡ laurent22/joplin ¡ GitHub and / or possibly may have been affected / worsened by Desktop: Resolves #520: Save and restore the cursor position when switching between notes by personalizedrefrigerator ¡ Pull Request #13447 ¡ laurent22/joplin ¡ GitHub

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9

I am on a Mac

to answer your questions:

1 - happens multiple times a day. I am only using joplin for 3-7 hrs a day.

2 - I have Joplin on my phone and my desktop mac, but am only using one at a time.

3 - I did update to 3.5.4. I did not notice any issues.

4 - I do not have that checked, currently. I believe I unchecked it after I noticed this issue.

5- No. I have not noticed that. I tried typing while sync was running and I could not duplicate it.

6 - The issue does NOT happen in safe mode.

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10

Thank you for your answers. Your answers do suggest an issue with the markdown editor specifically. When you enable safe mode, it uses a plain text editor. It also seems highly likely the issue is caused by Desktop: Resolves #520: Save and restore the cursor position when switching between notes by personalizedrefrigerator ¡ Pull Request #13447 ¡ laurent22/joplin ¡ GitHub as it started occuring in specifically version 3.5.5.

You could try doing the following, and see if that helps you to be able to use the full Markdown editor without the cursor jumping issues:

In tools, options, general, advanced settings, tick the ‘use the legacy Markdown editor’ option

11

I am sorry, but I realize I am actually using this in rich text editor mode.

When I tried that advanced setting, it gave me an error and I needed to restart in safe mode.

12

Thank you for the additional information!

I'm linking to a few related related pull requests:

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13

I was not going to post because this only happened to me once - but I see this is a real issue experienced by others. Here was my experience if it helps (Linux Mint 22.2 Cinnamon, Joplin 3.12.4 (prod, linux), Self hosted server, see plugins at end of post):

  1. I have not been able to reproduce this again - only happened once. I closed Joplin and re-opened it and it was fixed.

  2. When typing quickly the issue did not seem to show up. I would guess it took a 1 second delay before the cursor would move back one space. I would see this as losing the space between words when I stopped to think during typing (so either a backspace or move back one character - I don’t know which). Once I saw the behavior I was able to confirm that my keyboard space bar was not actually broken (which was what I originally thought)! I would stop typing after hitting the space bar and then a very short while later the cursor would move back (either it was deleted, or the cursor was moved).

  3. My guess was that it was related to some mechanism that pushes changed to the server when a user makes an edit and has stopped editing? See next point for details on why I think this.

  4. I am pretty sure I was using the rich text editor - I noticed that this seemed to track with the “switch editor” button being grayed out and coming back to it’s dark state. I never realized that that button set changed brightness before - but for me the backspace issue seemed to track with the button changing from it’s gray state to it’s normal state. So if I typed fast enough that the buttons stayed grey then everything was fine, but as soon as I stopped and it turned black the last character was deleted.

  5. During my final moments of wondering what was going on I think (I can’t be sure now) that I was able to do this in the middle of a word by stopping typing and it would actually delete the last character typed. I am not positive of this as I was in the middle of actually using Joplin for something important so didn’t really want to debug the issue further. Restarting made the problem go away.

Here are my plugins
Backup: 1.4.3
Conflict Resolution: 1.2.3
Freehand Drawing: 3.1.0
Note Tabs: 1.4.0
Reset Checkboxes: 1.1.2
VS-Code Style Note Search: 0.2.2

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