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"Ctrl-Z Undo" behaves differently from other text editors


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Hello everyone. I use Desktop Evernote for PC, and I'm confused about the behavior of Ctrl-Z Undo.

I type a lot - emails, Word, online forums, text editors, and of course Evernotes. And I use Ctrl-Z a lot, it's became a reflex for me to use Ctrl-Z in many situations. And I've noticed that in Evernote PC, when I press Ctrl-Z, multiple steps are undone together, which is unique. The result of undo always come out differently from what I expect, and It always throw me off. I tried to figure out its pattern, but wasn't able to.

Has this been discussed previously? What types of actions will be grouped together and undone together by Evernote PC? Thanks very much!

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  • Level 5*

Hi.  Odd,  because the Ctrl-Z issue I've seen mentioned here most is that it doesn't always restore an action - sometimes it's necessary to use that key combination more than once to get a reaction.  Have you tried powering the device off and on again?

If that doesn't help - on a Windows machine the easy standard fix is to uninstall,  restart and reinstall the app.

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6 hours ago, gazumped said:

If that doesn't help - eon a Windows machine the easy standard fix is to uninstall,  restart and reinstall the app.

This really sounds like regular Evernote support ;-)

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Yeah, I had a surprisingly large amount of text removed by Ctrl-Z recently too. Not sure if it was typed or pasted, but mostly typed I think. And then I had to remember that the "Redo" shortcut is Ctrl-Y, not  Ctrl-Shift-Z (a bit of Microsoft pollution, IMHO).

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I'll give a simple example:

Open Evernote, type "one plus one is two.". Then delete the word "two", and type "three" instead. Now you get "One plus one is three".

Now, if you want to revert this change, you press Ctrl-Z, guess what happens?

Now try in other text editors - email, MS Word, this forum, etc. You'll see the difference.

Now my question is: Is there a solution to this behavior? It throws me off so often.

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1 hour ago, Quuzuu said:

Open Evernote, type "one plus one is two.". Then delete the word "two", and type "three" instead. Now you get "One plus one is three".

Now, if you want to revert this change, you press Ctrl-Z, guess what happens?

This appeared to work fine for me, in the 6.6 GA.  That is, it removed 'three' as a whole (i.e., not character by character), then put back 'two' as a whole (and highlighted it), then removed 'is', 'one', 'plus', and 'one'. Is this supposed to work differently?

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2 hours ago, Quuzuu said:

I'll give a simple example:

Open Evernote, type "one plus one is two.". Then delete the word "two", and type "three" instead. Now you get "One plus one is three".

Now, if you want to revert this change, you press Ctrl-Z, guess what happens?

Now try in other text editors - email, MS Word, this forum, etc. You'll see the difference.

Now my question is: Is there a solution to this behavior? It throws me off so often.

I've noticed odd/inconsistent CTRL+Z behavior in Evernote for years. But 6.6 does seem to behave correctly (at least as far I've noticed thus far). Using your example, it behaved as expected.

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OMG it's true! 6.6 fixed it!

I was using 6.5, and I updated to 6.6 and it's fixed! I would say it's really a coincidence that I posted this question at this timing. But thanks very much everybody!

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  • 4 weeks later...

It's not all good news. Ctrl+z will not work beyond a certain word count. I had a rather large piece of typing, highlighted it to copy and quite by accident, typed ctrl+v followed immediately by ctrl+z. It did not undo at all. Instead, a popup appeared that invited me to view my history. The catch is I would have had to upgrade to the $72/year plan to do so. Pretty dirty trick - no undo button, disable ctrl+z, and demand $72 to do what ordinarily ctrl+z should do. I'll be looking for another note program and repeating this incident whenever the opportunity arises.

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On 29/08/2017 at 7:39 AM, Eric_S said:

The catch is I would have had to upgrade to the $72/year plan to do so.

Hi.  Sympathies for the loss - we've all done that Ctrl-V Ctrl-Z thing on occasion.  I wasn't aware there was an upper limit though.  Any feeling for how much text was involved here - are we talking 100's or 1,000's of characters??  I couldn't make Ctrl-Z fail on a test note here.

(Upgrading is the only way to get note history,  but even if you upgraded to Premium for one month only,  the feature would still work.  )

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7 hours ago, Eric_S said:

Right, 12 payments of $7.99 ($95.88) or 1 payment of $69.99. No option of just 1 month.

You would subscribe for the monthly payment plan, then cancel the renewal before the month is over

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Yep ctrl-z has always been weird. Glad to hear it's a bit better now.

It's also complicated by the annoying lack of word-count for highlighted sections. That is, to get word count for a section, you need to copy it into a new note, or delete the other text and restore thereafter. But the weird behaviour of ctrl-z can make losing text very hazardous if you need to get sectional word counts.

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