Typing in front of cursor

[Raknarg]

Hey, is there a keyboard shortcut or something to make it so when I type my cursor stays in the same spot instead of moving? Like you have backspace and delete do things in the opposite direction, is there a general shortcut to say "put this character/tab/space in front of the cursor instead"?

[Insectoid]

The 'insert' key does something like this.

[Raknarg]

The problem is that it replaces characters, whereas I still want to insert characters, but retain my cursors position.

[Nathan4102]

Are you trying to do this in some sort of program? If so, you could move the caret back one and then enter your character.

[Raknarg]

not a program.A key shortcut to use while typing.

[Dreadnought]

So are you trying to type backwards (i.e. caret is stationary relative to the characters to its right), or insert text at a position one character to the left of the caret (i.e. caret is stationary to the characters to its left)?

In the first case: Why?

In the second case: Nathan's suggestion is probably your best bet (it won't cost you more key presses than any shortcut).

edit: spelling

[Raknarg]

The first case, because I've noticed that in programming and other situations sometimes I have to do a lot of insertions on a lot of lines, especially things that are justbone character or a tab. So instead of having to do a down left a down left a down left, I do a down a down a down a down. If I do it fast, the first method is error prone unless im perfect with my timing.

[Dreadnought]

Ah I see. Well, your text editor might have some sort of feature where you can place multiple carets at once, you could try to find out. Unfortunately, I don't know of any other awy of accomplishing what you want. Sorry about that.

[Tony]

Dreadnought @ Mon Mar 02, 2015 12:11 pm wrote:

your text editor might have some sort of feature where you can place multiple carets at once

This.

The use case of a single character is very specific. I've seen some editors support this. Search & Replace (possibly regex based) might also be appropriate.