Thursday, October 19, 2006

Jumping cursor

Ever since I took possession of my ThinkPad T60p, it has suffered from an infuriating fault.  When I am typing, occasionally, and without warning, the cursor will jump to somewhere else in the document.  Sometimes it will even jump somewhere else and highlight a chunk of text at the same time.  This means I can be typing quickly and inadvertently delete a sentence from three paragraphs earlier in the document.

It drives me insane.

I figured out the problem today. My trackpoint (the red nipple) was configured to support "Press-to-Select".

I must have been brushing past it as I typed and making it think I had clicked the mouse. So, the insert cursor was jumping to wherever the mouse was positioned - and highlighting a section if it sensed that I was pressing for a longer period of time as I brushed over it.

The solution was simple

Control Panel -> Mouse -> Ultra-Nav Tab -> TrackPoint Settings -> Deselect "Enable Press-to-Select"

Phew!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

At least that one had a fix.

I use an optical mouse by Microsoft, which is much nicer than a ball mouse but occasionally it makes the cursor whoosh off in one direction. I haven't tried any other models so I don't know how they compare. I'll try cleaning the optics with cotton buds and gin and let you know if it helps.

This is one area where window managers with "click-to-focus" on windows are definitely better than "focus-on-enter". This would still be true without this particular cursor problem because you might still jog the mouse with your elbow (and type your banking password into MSN Messenger!)

Richard Brown said...

I find optical mice are very sensitive to the surface on which they sit. If I use mine on an even slightly shiny surfact, it jumps about unpredicably.

I wonder if you're experiencing something similar?

Anonymous said...

A sensible notion would be to have non-standard behaviours disabled by default. I know, a ridiculous thought on my account.

Richard Brown said...

But it's a FEATURE!!!

(Actually.... I suspect I may have selected the option myself when I first set the machine up in one of those high-speed "get everything configured" rituals that one follows)