What practical use does the ‘overtype’ function on a computer serve? It honestly seems more annoying than helpful
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It is probably a legacy feature from a time when plain text in a mono-spaced typewriter-like font was used on computers. Then you could fill in a form without shifting the field labels or box drawing symbols around. In plain text you often didn’t have any formatting and any lines or brackets were part of the same text. The text being overtyped also wouldn’t jump around because the replacement symbol always had the same width.
Today overtyping is used when editing raw data directly in a hex editor, where inserting and deleting is usually not desired.
Its more of a historic relic.
Firstly, it probably came from typewriters, since typewriters had a similar thing going for them and a lot of our typing on computers evolved from typewriters.
Two, insert mode is actually pretty expensive for computers to handle. To make space for a new character, in a file, you would have to shift all the characters after your cursor in that file down by 1 to make space, or have a more complicated scheme involving the computer keeping a record of inserted snippets and inserting them into the appropriate places when reading a file. On modern computers, this of course doesn’t matter as much, they are plenty fast, but on the bricks from the 80s, it was very expensive. Overtype is simpler, you replace one character with another.
It is probably a legacy feature from a time when plain text in a mono-spaced typewriter-like font was used on computers. Then you could fill in a form without shifting the field labels or box drawing symbols around. In plain text you often didn’t have any formatting and any lines or brackets were part of the same text. The text being overtyped also wouldn’t jump around because the replacement symbol always had the same width.
Today overtyping is used when editing raw data directly in a hex editor, where inserting and deleting is usually not desired.
It is probably a legacy feature from a time when plain text in a mono-spaced typewriter-like font was used on computers. Then you could fill in a form without shifting the field labels or box drawing symbols around. In plain text you often didn’t have any formatting and any lines or brackets were part of the same text. The text being overtyped also wouldn’t jump around because the replacement symbol always had the same width.
Today overtyping is used when editing raw data directly in a hex editor, where inserting and deleting is usually not desired.
Its more of a historic relic.
Firstly, it probably came from typewriters, since typewriters had a similar thing going for them and a lot of our typing on computers evolved from typewriters.
Two, insert mode is actually pretty expensive for computers to handle. To make space for a new character, in a file, you would have to shift all the characters after your cursor in that file down by 1 to make space, or have a more complicated scheme involving the computer keeping a record of inserted snippets and inserting them into the appropriate places when reading a file. On modern computers, this of course doesn’t matter as much, they are plenty fast, but on the bricks from the 80s, it was very expensive. Overtype is simpler, you replace one character with another.
Its more of a historic relic.
Firstly, it probably came from typewriters, since typewriters had a similar thing going for them and a lot of our typing on computers evolved from typewriters.
Two, insert mode is actually pretty expensive for computers to handle. To make space for a new character, in a file, you would have to shift all the characters after your cursor in that file down by 1 to make space, or have a more complicated scheme involving the computer keeping a record of inserted snippets and inserting them into the appropriate places when reading a file. On modern computers, this of course doesn’t matter as much, they are plenty fast, but on the bricks from the 80s, it was very expensive. Overtype is simpler, you replace one character with another.
It doesn’t really make much sense with prose, but I occasionally use it when I’m dealing with data.
There are times when you’re not really going to want to *insert* text or data, because that would move the data after out of place.
/u/Jason_Peterson mentions hex data, which is a good example. I was using it the other day while playing around with combinations of numbers (thinking about a [killer sudoku](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_sudoku)) and overtype was clearly the way to go when I wanted to adjust things…
As with all such features, it’s a tool – not the right tool for every use, and not everyone will *have* a use for that tool, but while there are use cases, the tool will exist 🙂
It doesn’t really make much sense with prose, but I occasionally use it when I’m dealing with data.
There are times when you’re not really going to want to *insert* text or data, because that would move the data after out of place.
/u/Jason_Peterson mentions hex data, which is a good example. I was using it the other day while playing around with combinations of numbers (thinking about a [killer sudoku](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_sudoku)) and overtype was clearly the way to go when I wanted to adjust things…
As with all such features, it’s a tool – not the right tool for every use, and not everyone will *have* a use for that tool, but while there are use cases, the tool will exist 🙂
It doesn’t really make much sense with prose, but I occasionally use it when I’m dealing with data.
There are times when you’re not really going to want to *insert* text or data, because that would move the data after out of place.
/u/Jason_Peterson mentions hex data, which is a good example. I was using it the other day while playing around with combinations of numbers (thinking about a [killer sudoku](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_sudoku)) and overtype was clearly the way to go when I wanted to adjust things…
As with all such features, it’s a tool – not the right tool for every use, and not everyone will *have* a use for that tool, but while there are use cases, the tool will exist 🙂
Have you ever filled in a form using a word processor like Microsoft Word? If the field you’re filling in is within some sort of box, or on a line, you will notice that the new text pushes the symbols afterwards across the page, and it messes up the entire form.
Instead, you can “insert” the text in place by replacing the character underneath. This maintains the format of the document but allows you to type freely.
Nowadays, it isn’t as useful for most people, but this was a very common issue a few decades back.
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