Me vs Backspace: my war against a rogue character

This would be a good time to point out that OSX supports Emacs bindings in all Cocoa text fields.<p>For example, you can press ctrl+a to go to the beginning of the line and ctrl+e to go to the end of the line. The "Meta" modifier can be accessed via alt+ctrl, so you can alt+ctrl+f to go forward a word, or alt+ctrl+b to go back a word. Any motion can be combined with shift to select the text.<p>These are especially useful with the laptop keyboards. Bonus points if you convert your caps lock key into an additional ctrl key: <a href="http://mkaz.com/archives/86/disable-caps-lock-on-mac-os-x/" rel="nofollow">http://mkaz.com/archives/86/disable-caps-lock-on-mac-os-x/</a>

Reminds me of finding out the hard way that "paste" is bound to Mouse3 by default in Gnome and that on some mice I'll occasionally scroll the wheel violently enough to trigger clicks.<p>Took a few times of finding random text in my code to realize what was happening, and even longer to figure out how.

I've verified this issue using TextEdit saving the file and printing it using "od -a".<p>I've also submitted it to bugreport.apple.com as bug # 8223684

Interesting. In my text editor (TextMate), I can reproduce this pretty reliably using that key sequence.

Here is another article I found on this, "Mac Delete Key Bug Demonstration".<p><a href="http://gunther.web66.com/crossjava/Bugs/deletekeybug/" rel="nofollow">http://gunther.web66.com/crossjava/Bugs/deletekeybug/</a>

<i>I decided to wipe my Mac, reinstall the OS, and see if that fixed it.</i><p>So reinstalling the whole OS was higher up the troubleshooting chain than just trying it out from your wife's computer? Err...

I do all the shift+arrow text marking with my right hand solely, incl. cmd+backspace (delete) - and so, I never run into the problem of accidentally inserting the $08 character anywhere.<p>But, yes, you are right, holding shift+any arrow key, while hitting backspace, inserts a $08 by the OS X IME. This does depend on what kind of dialog you are writing in (NSTextField, NSTextInput etc.), however, as not all of them accepts this input. You can't input a backspace character this way in Terminal.app, f.e.