When using the arrow keys in Writer to move the cursor within a document, Left and Right perform generally as expected but Up and Down do not move the cursor directly up and down to the side of the character in the line above or below most nearly vertically aligned with the cursor’s position immediately prior to hitting the arrow key, but rather several words to the left or right in the line above or below.
This question was asked by another user more than two years ago (1/13/2016 “trouble navigating with up & down arrow keys” by user AAA) and updated a few months afterward (by user Alex Kemp, 3/10/2016), but never answered. In that post, user AAA noted that the cursor moves several words to the left or right “depending on where the cursor was when I began typing on the line before hitting the up [or down] arrow”.
My “karma” is insufficient to upvote or otherwise re-prioritize that question, so I am posting anew here.
This behavior is maddening and counterproductive, and further inconsistent with selection behavior, which is actually a second but related issue: when the user selects a block of text and then presses one of the arrow keys, the cursor moves relative to the last individual cursor position as opposed to relative to the entire selection. E.g. if I write “This is some text” and then select the word “some” and press the Left arrow key, the cursor will move to “is| some” if I had selected “some” from right to left, but to “som|e” if I had selected it from left to right.).
Edit: Adding screencast. After typing the first “xxx” filler, I press the Up arrow key once, and the cursor moves up or down from the point I began typing, not the point where I finished (and where the cursor was immediately prior to Up/Down keyboard input). After typing the second sequence of filler, bringing the cursor to the next line, I pressed the Up key once, and the cursor returned to where I began typing the filler text. Then I made selections and pressed either Left or Right, again displaying the behavior I described above.