Bug 2441633

Summary: KWrite changes my text as I type in vanilla mode
Product: [Fedora] Fedora Reporter: David Tonhofer <bughunt>
Component: kateAssignee: Than Ngo <than>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: unspecified    
Version: 43CC: gfonsecabr, kde-sig, than
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Hardware: x86_64   
OS: Linux   
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Description Flags
Webm showing kwrite behaving weirdly none

Description David Tonhofer 2026-02-21 13:15:22 UTC
Preliminary
===========

This is about the "kwrite" editor, which comes with package "kwrite".
However the bugzilla interface has not component for "kwrite", so I'm selecting "kate".

However, "kate" (actually a separate package) is not installed on this system, I have kwrite-25.12.2-2.fc43.x86_64

Description
===========

So I'm running KWrite to edit a config file

> Normal Mdoe
> No Highlighting
> Normal Indentation

The text file contains:

------
/etc/pki/

# Private Key

FROM_DIR=/etc/pki/tls/

${FROM_DIR}/private/httpd/foo.bar.baz.key
/etc/pki/tls/certs/cert.pem
/etc/pki/tls/certs/httpd/foo.bar.baz.cert.pem
------

I place the cursor on the start of the line "/etc/pki/tls/certs/cert.pem".
I start to highlight text either from the keyboard with SHIFT or using the mouse.
The first "/" at the beginning of the line disappears! 
After that I cannot go back to the start of the line and mark "etc".
I don't understand this behaviour and neither does my dog.

Attaching a screencast.






Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
See above
Actual Results:
KWrite decides to automodify content

Expected Results:
KWrite should not decide to automodify content

Comment 1 David Tonhofer 2026-02-21 13:16:25 UTC
Created attachment 2130424 [details]
Webm showing kwrite behaving weirdly

Comment 2 David Tonhofer 2026-02-21 16:48:46 UTC
There is also a problem with copy/paste which mangles the text from time to time, but I see no pattern yet. It all feels like a bad indexing error somewhere.

Comment 3 David Tonhofer 2026-03-05 21:08:51 UTC
Additional note: I thought it might be a problem with drawing routines but no. 

Once the first "/" disappears incongruously while selecting text and you save the file, the "/" is indeed missing in the file.

Additionally and maybe related, I now have a problem with renaming in "dolphin" whereby it is impossible to select the first letter of a filename, as doing so immediately advances the cursor to the first non-alphanumeric character. I have no idea what triggered that behaviour but it doesn't go away for now 🧐

Comment 4 Guilherme D. da Fonseca 2026-03-23 12:50:19 UTC
Bug 2449945 is a duplicate of this bug.